Thursday, July 31, 2014

Career Profiles: Astronomer to Image Processor for STScI

The AAS Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy and the AAS Employment Committee have compiled dozens of interviews highlighting the diversity of career trajectories available to astronomers. The interviews share advice and lessons learned from individuals on those paths.

Below is our interview with Lisa Frattare, an astronomer turned Master Astronomical Image Processor at the Space Telescope Science Institute and Coordinator for the summer student program. She is very satisfied with her work-life balance within a very family-friendly environment. If you have questions, suggestions, advice to share, etc. about this career path, please leave a comment below.

For access to all our Career Profile Project interviews, please visit http://aas.org/jobs/career-profiles. We plan to post a new career profile to this blog every Thursday.

Tuesday, July 29, 2014

Working Toward the Ideal Astronomy Department

 
Today's guest blogger is Bruce Balick. Bruce is a former member of the AAS Council, a former department chair, and the past Chair of the Faculty Senate at the University of Washington.  He has been interested best practices for recruiting and retaining outstanding young faculty with long and productive academic careers ahead of them.

There comes a time in the lives of some academics when they wonder whether they are a happy fit into the their department (or similar professional unit).  To quote from an article in STATUS by Meg Urry, "Many of us have worked in unpleasant environments. What happens? You spend a lot of time thinking about the sources of friction, complaining to yourself and to others about the bad things that have happened, trying to calm distraught colleagues so they won’t leave."

Frustrated department members must wonder whether they or the larger unit are to blame.  Then they ask whether there are some objective standards that they are useful for answering this question. 

Yes, there are. 

Monday, July 28, 2014

Please do not disturb: Pumping in progress

This is the sign that adorns my office doorknob every day around noon and again at 3. And this is more or less what I look like as I pump -- yes, quite the fashion statement. Thankfully my officemate is comfortable with my pumping in our office. More importantly, however, is that I have the convenient option to use the new lactation room in my building.

Northwestern University's Tech Building is no exception. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) requires employers to allow time for pumping as well as a reasonable space (that's not a bathroom!) to pump. Specifically, the law requires that employers “provide a reasonable break time for an employee to express breast milk for her nursing child for one year after the child’s birth each time such employee has need to express milk.” Moreover, employers must “provide a place, other than a bathroom, that is shielded from view and free from intrusion from co-workers and the public” for nursing employees.

Thursday, July 24, 2014

Career Profiles: Astronomer to Financial Analyst

The AAS Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy and the AAS Employment Committee have compiled dozens of interviews highlighting the diversity of career trajectories available to astronomers. The interviews share advice and lessons learned from individuals on those paths.

Below is our interview with an astronomer turned financial analyst. S/he went straight to finance after obtaining her/his Ph.D. Location, salary, and work environment were important factors in his/her decision to leave astronomy. If you have questions, suggestions, advice to share, etc. about this career path, please leave a comment below.

For access to all our Career Profile Project interviews, please visit http://aas.org/jobs/career-profiles. We plan to post a new career profile to this blog every Thursday.

Wednesday, July 23, 2014

Survive Academia with this One Simple Trick!

Cross-posted from Astrobetter:

Dr. Sarah Ballard completed her PhD in Astronomy & Astrophysics at Harvard University in 2012 and is now a NASA Carl Sagan fellow at the University of Washington. She’s written articles for the Harvard Crimson and for the Women in Astronomy blog about parental leave, values affirmation, and the intelligence of groups.  On her website, she also provides some resources for running your own Impostor Syndrome workshop.  Follow her on Twitter at: @hubbahubble

Local scientists discover the technique they don’t want you to know about!
(Sarah Rugheimer at left, Sarah Ballard at right)

Monday, July 21, 2014

Why So Few? Spatial Skills

The 2010 report entitled, Why So Few? Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics, by the American Association of University Women (AAUW), investigates the area of spatial skills learning. One of the largest and most persistent gender gaps in cognitive skills is found in the area of spatial skills, where boys and men consistently outperform girls and women on average. Spatial skills are thought to be critically important for success in fields such as engineering, and many people believe that they are innate and, therefore, some believe that the gender difference in spatial skills explains why there are so few women in engineering, for example.

Research highlighted in the report, however, shows that spatial skills are not fixed and can improve dramatically in a short time with training. This picture shows a sample question on mental rotation, one example of spatial skills. Do you know the right answer? It is D.

Thursday, July 17, 2014

Career Profiles: Astronomer to Associate Professor of Physics at a Small Liberal Arts College

The AAS Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy and the AAS Employment Committee have compiled dozens of interviews highlighting the diversity of career trajectories available to astronomers. The interviews share advice and lessons learned from individuals on those paths.

Below is our interview with an astronomer turned Associate Professor of Physics. S/he is the only astronomer in her/his department within a small liberal arts college. In the profile below, s/he discusses the enjoyable aspects as well as the challenges of her/his position. If you have questions, suggestions, advice to share, etc. about this career path, please leave a comment below.

For access to all our Career Profile Project interviews, please visit http://aas.org/jobs/career-profiles. We plan to post a new career profile to this blog every Thursday.



Wednesday, July 16, 2014

Elite Male Faculty Employ Fewer Women

MIT 2011My title has removed the words "in the Life Sciences" from the title of an article published June 30 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.  While I do not have statistics to demonstrate the universality of this conclusion, I do have some relevant experience and connections to the work to share.



In their article, MIT biology graduate student Jason Sheltzer and physics graduate Joan C. Smith showed that senior male professors in biology, especially those who have prestigious awards or are members of the National Academies, train a significantly smaller percentage of female graduate students and postdocs than their female or junior colleagues.  The most prestigious labs, led by men and offering many of the best career development opportunities, are the least likely to train women.  The data are convincing, and the effect is clear: women are less likely than men to get either the professional development opportunities or the top letters of recommendation from these prestigious labs.  It’s no wonder that only 36% of assistant professors in biology are women, even though half of the PhDs in biology go to women.

I have a very personal perspective on this study.  Joan C. Smith was an undergraduate physics major at MIT while I was the Physics Department Head.  We worked together to organize the 2011 Northeast Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics, a national conference of great importance to our field (a photo of which is at the head of this blog entry).  She is also a superb experimental physicist, programmer and engineer.  I am thrilled that she turned her statistical and data analysis talents to shine such a clear light on a major problem of the professoriate.

It’s personal too

But it’s not just the biologists who should ask, “Have I done everything I can to identify, encourage and advance talented individuals applying to my research group?”  You see, Sheltzer and Smith were led to this study when they heard a physics graduate student at a dinner party mention she was the first female student her advisor had graduated in 20 years.  I couldn’t help but wonder, was it my graduate student they spoke with?  So I looked up my record and found an 18-year gap between my PhDs awarded to women, 2 out of 16 total.  Ouch.  As I spoke with pride of my students and their successes over the years, I never stopped to think about how I was shaping the future face of the profession.

In recent years my research group has been gender balanced; by including undergraduates, that is easy to achieve even in theoretical astrophysics at MIT.  However, we must ask not what is easy, but what is right.  Unless "elite male faculty" recruit, mentor and promote more women and others from underrepresented groups, science will suffer from our failure to adequately draw talent from more than half the population.

I encourage other faculty members, male and female, to take this matter personally, too.

Monday, July 14, 2014

A Painting is Worth Three Hundred and Eleven Words

Hiring statistics, harassment, bias, glass ceiling, discrimination, ….   All important topics to discuss and address to improve our world.  But I have a more cheery subject on my mind today, namely art.  Scientific American had an on-line article in March on art depicting women in STEM fields.  The pages were filled with interesting paintings and discussions of the scientists depicted.  See
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/15-works-of-art-depicting-women-in-science/

The author, Maia Weinstock, comments on the importance of art and design in science and technology and morphs STEM into STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art and math).  Pictures and paintings of scientists have historically concentrated on male subjects.  Since pictures have such an important effect on our perception and memory, it is important to highlight the few works of art that depicted women scientists … and to create more of them!

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I particularly like the painting of Marie Curie holding a test tube with the outline of a snake around it.  It is “Marie Curie"  painted by Jeff Fenwick.  Her eyes are locked quizzically on the tube seemingly pondering the nature of the radioactive material it contains.  Is the snake meant to be a sinister hint of the radiation dangers of her research that eventually led to her death?  Or, as the author Jeff Fenwick points out, does it represent the Rod of Asclepius symbol of medicine which greatly benefited from the discover of radioactive materials?



Other paintings and drawings include those of scientists such as chimpanzee expert Jane Goodall, discoverer of the Cepheid luminosity-period relationship Henrietta Swan Leavitt, X-ray crystallographer Rosalind Franklin, and astronauts Mae Jemison and Sally Ride.  They are of different styles and quite interesting to view.

The author will be the guest curator of an exhibition of a selection of these art works at the Art Science Gallery in Austin, Texas, from September 13 through October 15, 2014.  It would definitely be worth a visit.

Thursday, July 10, 2014

Career Profiles: Astronomer to Head of Bioinformatics

The AAS Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy and the AAS Employment Committee have compiled dozens of interviews highlighting the diversity of career trajectories available to astronomers. The interviews share advice and lessons learned from individuals on those paths.

Below is our interview with Alicia Oshlack, an astronomer turned Head of Bioinformatics for Murdoch Children's Research Institute at the Royal Children's Hospital. She is very satisfied with her job and the family friendly environment. If you have questions, suggestions, advice to share, etc. about this career path, please leave a comment below.

For access to all our Career Profile Project interviews, please visit http://aas.org/jobs/career-profiles. We plan to post a new career profile to this blog every Thursday.

Wednesday, July 9, 2014

Your Unconscious Gender Bias Could Kill You

Today’s guest blogger is Stella Offner. She is a Hubble Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale University.
 
If you’ve been a long-time (or even recent reader) of AAS Women, you will be familiar with the many perils of unconscious bias (1). You will be aware that unconscious bias related to gender can result in unintended discrepancies in women’s salary, citation count, award recognition, funding, mentoring opportunities, and of course, flat-out discrimination.  All these things are bad for women generally and for equality in science, specifically. Just in case you are still not convinced that gender bias is not a big deal and doesn’t apply to you, did you also know that your unconscious gender bias could kill you? Seriously.

Monday, July 7, 2014

Are Review Panel Discussions Gendered? The View from Sweden

Just after submitting your grant application, you might wonder how it will be viewed by the panel. Is your research broad, independent, and showing great potential? Or, is the work unfocussed, isolated, and ultimately betraying you as inexperienced? The answer, at least in Sweden, might depend on your gender.

This past week I attended the European Week of Astronomy and Space Science 2014 meeting in Geneva, Switzerland. For US readers, think of this as a little like a European AAS. On Wednesday afternoon there was a Special Meeting on Myths and Facts About Women in Astronomy. The session was devoted to data about the participation of women in astrophysics, and the organizers focussed on avoiding speculation and myths -- just the facts, please.

I had the pleasure of presenting the results from the recent demographics survey of US astronomers led by CSWA member Prof. A. Meredith Hughes. I won't recap those results here since we have already blogged about them (see here and here for some highlights). What I did want to highlight, however, was how the CSWA data are unique! With a 20 year baseline and nearly 100% participation rate, we can understand what has changed, and what has not with regard to the participation of women in astrophysics. The speakers from other countries mostly presented data gathered by their national science foundations for all of science, or (at best) physics (including astronomy). Of course those were also quite interesting, but it left me hoping that at least some of the larger European countries might conduct national surveys similar to the CSWA demographics survey. (If one looks at science as a whole, the statistics tend to be dominated by life sciences, where the participation of women is quite different than in astronomy -- astronomers need their own survey!)  Importantly, the CSWA survey isn't run by a national science agency: It consists of a few devoted individuals sending letters to the heads of various departments and institutes, and then compiling and analyzing the responses.

For me, the standout talk was by Johanna Andersson, the Head of Equality Work at Chalmers University in Sweden. She described being invited by a faculty member to sit in on a scientific review panel, and immediately noting the different adjectives used to described the work of men and women.  The work of men would often be described as deep, whereas the work of women would be narrow. Men would be broad, women would be unfocussed. Men would be independent, women would be isolated. Men would be full of potential, women would be inexperienced. The pairs of adjectives fascinated me, and I reflected on the letters of support I have written over the years.

Wednesday, July 2, 2014

Stop Interrupting Me: Gender, Conversation Dominance, and Listener Bias


I've lost track of the number of times I've experienced the following scenarios:

1) During a heated discussion―speaking clearly and out loud―I say something that no one appears to hear. A man repeats it minutes, maybe seconds later, to accolades and group discussion.

2) I am participating in a group interview of a candidate. When he answers questions he looks directly at the men in the room, but never or rarely looks at meeven when I was the one to ask the question.  He asks questions of the men onlyeven questions which I am clearly the most appropriate person to address.

3) I am at a party. The topic of physics (or cosmology, or data science) comes up.  A male I have just met proceeds to explain to me a New York Times article he has read on the subject. I mention that I have my PhD and I'm an expert on the topic. Instead of using this as an opportunity to ask me questions and learn from me, he continues talk about what he knows. Bonus points: He turns to my boyfriendwho isn't a physicist or a data scientistand asks him questions about the topic.

4) I am part of a male-dominated discussion.  I keep trying to participate but repeatedly get interrupted and talked-over.  The only way to be heard is to interrupt back, talk-over people myself, or call out the behavior and ask people to let me finish.  All of these feel overly aggressive and makes me uncomfortable, so I end up remaining silent, not contributing to the discussion.

Tuesday, July 1, 2014

ADVICE: Affordable Suggestions for Department Chairs

This Department is Under Construction
Fran Bagenal from the University of Colorado started this list of suggestions for improving the department climate and helping with the recruitment of students from underrepresented groups.  Readers* of the “Diversity in Physics and Astronomy” Facebook page made addition contributions.

1 - Once a month or so invite about 4 students for lunch/tea in your office and ask them (i) what's going well, (ii) what could be improved in the department. More than 3 less intimidating, less than 6 allows everyone to speak. Pick specific groups or mix them up. 

2 - Make a study area that is inviting & comfortable. Challenge the students to come up with ideas for wall hangings celebrating scientific achievements from a diverse group of achievers.

3 - Pay senior students to hang around the study area as informal "study buddies" to the junior students. This not only helps the younger students get over the common road bump where they are discouraged by their first challenging physics course - but there's nothing like teaching for mastering the basics.