Astronomy

AASWomen for August 3rd, 2012

AAS Committee on the Status of Women
Issue of August 3, 2012
eds. Daryl Haggard, Michele Montgomery, Nick Murphy, and Caroline Simpson

This week's issues:

1. New CSWA resource page on career breaks and web report

2. Introduction to Astronomical Bullying, revisited

3. Management Restructuring

4. The Women Who Would Have Been Sally Ride

5. 12 Women chosen for the 2012-2013 APS Minority Scholarship

6. Theoretical physicists (all men) win massive awards

7. Gender-balanced research

8. Academia: Should I Stay or Should I Go?

9. Now Stand in the Place Where You Work

10. Job Opportunities

11. How to Submit to the AASWomen Newsletter

12. How to Subscribe or Unsubscribe to the AASWomen Newsletter

13. Access to Past Issues of the AASWomen Newsletter

1. New CSWA resource page on career breaks and web report
From: Nancy Morrison [NMorris_at_UTNet.UToledo.edu]

In the CSWA Resource pages, you will now find a page on resuming a science career after a break:

http://www.aas.org/cswa/career-break.html

It's the last of our originally contemplated resource pages. If you have a topic on which you'd like to see an additional page, please let us know. Any additional resources for the existing pages are always appreciated. For a complete list of resources, including some that don't fit comfortably within the individual topics, see:

http://www.aas.org/cswa/resources.html

Information that existed on our pages before the advent of the resource pages are still there via links in the left side menu on the home page:

http://www.aas.org/cswa/links.html

http://www.aas.org/cswa/advice.html

In addition to our regular web pages, we operate a Twitter account and a Facebook page. The Twitter account functions as a news feed more than a social medium, that is, it rarely replies to or comments on others' tweets; it just passes them on.

* Twitter: AAS CSWA or @AAS_Women. It is following 68 other Twitter users, mostly scientific societies, bloggers on women in science, and individuals active in this area. It has 130 followers as of today. Not all the followers are astronomers, and not all are women or women's groups. Twitter users can research the followers and the followed by viewing the account's Profile page. It has issued 175 tweets so far, mostly retweets from others but including announcements such as the above new page.

* Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Committee-on-the-Status-of-Women-in-Astronomy/43977374494?ref=ts . Its weekly total reach is usually around 300, but has been as large as 1,400 during the past few weeks. This number refers to the number of distinct (or "unique") users who have viewed Facebook content related to the page during the week.

If you'd like to know more about any of these topics, please don't hesitate to email me, tweet to @AAS_Women, or post to Facebook, as appropriate.

If you'd like to join Twitter but don't know how, see the helpful instructions relayed by me from Michele Montgomery, AASWOMEN, March 2, 2012

http://www.aas.org/cswa/bulletin.board/2012/03.02.12.html

2. Introduction to Astronomical Bullying, revisited
From: Nancy Morrison [NMorris_at_UTNet.UToledo.edu]

On July 26, 2012, CSWA Chair Joan Schmelz gave a reprise of her Town Hall presentation from the AAS Anchorage meeting to a large, interested audience at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. A lively discussion followed.

The slides from the original town hall are on the CSWA web site, here:

http://www.aas.org/cswa/CSWA_TownHall_Bullying.pdf

3. Management Restructuring
From: Hannah Jang-Condell via womeninastronomy.blogspot.com

As mentioned in last week's AASWOMEN, the time has come for me to step down from the CSWA and make room for new blood.

I'd say I'm doing it to "spend more time with my family" but that's not really true. (Why this phrase is a euphemism for "I was fired" merits it's own discussion, but not here!) It's simply that the end of my second three-year term has come up, and I'm become too busy in other areas of my life to give the attention to the CSWA that it deserves.

To read more, please see

http://womeninastronomy.blogspot.com

4. The Women Who Would Have Been Sally Ride
From: Daryl Haggard [dhaggard_at_northwestern.edu]

The subtitle of this article from The Atlantic speaks for itself: "The truth is: the sexism of the day overwhelmed the science of the day." The author describes the extraordinary efforts by women in the 1960s and 70s to be admitted to NASA's astronaut core (even buying their own jet to train in). It also highlights the biased social climate these women were up against, including a NASA report that discusses female astronauts' usefulness for "direct sexual release" during extended space missions. That section of the report goes on to say "that a woman, qualified from a scientific viewpoint, might be persuaded to donate her time and energies for the sake of improving crew morale".

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/07/the-women-who-would-have-been-sally-ride/260246

The article also points to a book on the subject, "Right Stuff, Wrong Sex" by Margaret A. Weitekamp

http://books.google.com/books/about/Right_Stuff_Wrong_Sex.html?id=vV-9GPfng0wC

5. 12 Women chosen for the 2012-2013 APS Minority Scholarship
From: WIPHYS, July 31, 2012

[At least 3 of the female awardees, including Karla Guardado (MIT), Natalia Guerrero (MIT), and Odessa Winter (UNM) have an interest in astronomy and astrophysics. -Eds.]

The APS Committee on Minorities has selected 38 students -- 12 of them female -- for the 2012-2013 Scholarship for Minority Undergraduate Physics Majors.

The scholarship is open to any African-American, Hispanic, or Native American US citizen or permanent resident who is majoring or planning to major in physics, and who is a high school senior, college freshman, or sophomore. The application deadline for the 2013-2014 academic year is February 1, 2013.

Find more info here

http://www.aps.org/programs/minorities/index.cfm

6. Theoretical physicists (all men) win massive awards
From: Daryl Haggard [dhaggard_at_northwestern.edu]

[Thank you to Laura Trouille for pointing out this news item. -Eds.]

The Fundamental Physics Prize Foundation has awarded $27 million to nine pioneering theoretical physicists -- none of them are women. Here's the Nature article from which I borrowed the heading

http://www.nature.com/news/theoretical-physicists-win-massive-awards-1.11094

Information about the prize is here

http://fundamentalphysicsprize.org/index.html

Perhaps some pro-active nominating of women is in order, as per Ed Bertschinger's blog post of June 3, 2012

http://womeninastronomy.blogspot.com/2012/06/awards-there-is-problem-and-we-can.html

7. Gender-balanced research
From: Daryl Haggard [dhaggard_at_northwestern.edu]

Here's an interesting discussion and interview with Prof. Claudine Hermann, Vice-President of the European Platform of Women Scientists (EPWS). Quoting from the article, "While about 45 per cent of European PhD graduates are women, this share falls to 18 per cent for full professors."

To read more, please see

http://www.epws.net/2012/07/gender-balanced-research-interview-with.html

8. Academia: Should I Stay or Should I Go?
From: Daryl Haggard [dhaggard_at_northwestern.edu]

The following blog post from Ars Experientia and the response on Beki's Blog might be of interest to members of our community. Both bloggers are (or have until recently been) academic computer scientists.

On Leaving Academia by Terran Lane

http://cs.unm.edu/~terran/academic_blog/?p=113

On Not Leaving Academia by Beki Grinter

http://beki70.wordpress.com/2012/07/26/on-not-leaving-academia

And here's a related article from The Chronicle of Higher Education:

Why Are Associate Professors So Unhappy?

http://chronicle.com/article/Why-Are-Associate-Professors/132071

9. Now Stand in the Place Where You Work
From: Laura Trouille [l-trouille_at_northwestern.edu]

A recent post on the FemaleScienceProfessor blog about office setup is interesting in terms of how to create the right atmosphere in interactions with students:

http://science-professor.blogspot.com/2012/07/now-stand-in-place-where-you-work.html

10. Job Opportunities

* Faculty Position in Experimental Gravitational Wave Physics and Particle Astrophysics at the University of Chicago

-- Assistant Professor: http://tinyurl.com/bua5x63 -- Associate Professor: http://tinyurl.com/bvmb9cy

11. How to Submit to the AASWOMEN newsletter

To submit an item to the AASWOMEN newsletter, including replies to topics, send email to aaswomen_at_aas.org

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12. How to Subscribe or Unsubscribe to the AASWOMEN newsletter

Join AAS Women List by email:

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Please remember to replace "_at_" in the e-mail address above.

13. Access to Past Issues of the AASWomen Newsletter

http://www.aas.org/cswa/AASWOMEN.html

Each annual summary includes an index of topics covered.

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Astronomy