AASWOMEN Newsletter for June 05, 2015
Issue of June 05, 2015
eds: Daryl Haggard, Nicolle Zellner, Meredith Hughes, & Elysse Voyer
This week's issues:
1. Reminder: Inclusive Astronomy Conference & Call for Help: IAU XXIX General Assembly Women's events
2. My response to 'Bothered' from the Science Magazine Career Advice Section
3. Addressing Career Breaks Head-on in CVs and Cover Letters
4. Bright Sky, Starry City: An Illustrated Love Letter to Our Communion with the Cosmos, Celebrating Women Astronomers
5. The First Black Female Astronaut On Fear, Audacity, And The Importance of Inclusion
6. Bias against women in science persists, even in egalitarian societies
7. How to Submit to the AASWOMEN newsletter
8. How to Subscribe or Unsubscribe to the AASWOMEN newsletter
9. Access to Past Issues
1. Reminder: Inclusive Astronomy Conference & Call for Help: IAU XXIX General Assembly Women's events
From: Christina Richey via womeninastronomy.blogspot.com
Several events occurring this summer will give astronomers the chance to discussion equity and inclusion topics and participate in ways to improve our community. This blog will be dedicated to two upcoming conferences and for two different purposes:
-The Inclusive Astronomy Conference (which has finalized their Science Program and has extended the deadline for registration to this Friday)
AND
-The Women's events for the IAU XXIX General Assembly (which includes a call for topics to be covered and a request for volunteers from the community to lead table discussions or to serve as a mentor for early career members).
Read more at
http://womeninastronomy.blogspot.com/2015/06/reminder-inclusive-astronomy-conference.html
Back to top.2. My response to 'Bothered' from the Science Magazine Career Advice Section
From: Christina Richey via womeninastronomy.blogspot.com
On June 1st, a postdoctoral fellow wrote in to Science Magazine's Career Advice Editor to ask for help with an issue she is having in her lab. Her advisor has been looking down her shirt when she meets with him in his office, and she was upset by the behavior and wanted advice on what to do. The advice she received from 'Ask Alice' was upsetting to many, and resulted in the post being removed within a couple of hours of being posted and a fury of responses emailed to the editor (including one from myself), as well as on twitter and Facebook, and even in the national media. The post was removed (I still have attached the archived version here), and Science posted an apology instead.
Instead of focusing on just how terrible the previous advice was, I'd like to give 'Bothered' or anyone experiencing a situation like described by 'Bothered' some advice myself, based off my work within our field on anti-harassment policies and procedures. I welcome any and all to read the presentations I've given previously at the Division of Planetary Sciences Conference in 2012 or from the Susan Niebur event at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference event in 2014 as well as various other posts made to the Women in Astronomy Blog. Both presentations on anti-harassment policies were conference-focused, but also included key definitions of harassment from institutions that are based primarily in planetary science (although all institutions policies should be readily available, and I highly recommend knowing the policy at your institution).
Read more at
http://womeninastronomy.blogspot.com/2015/06/my-response-to-bothered-from-science.html
Back to top.3. Addressing Career Breaks Head-on in CVs and Cover Letters
From: Laura Trouille via womeninastronomy.blogspot.com
Emily Nicholson, an Australian ecologist, has written a fascinating 1-pager at Science Magazine about addressing career breaks head-on in your CV and cover letter when applying for jobs and grants. She writes:
My early job applications-using a standard CV that mentioned my maternity leaves only in passing... didn't get so much as an interview... Then, with mentoring and advice from colleagues and friends, I reshaped my CV to account for the time I'd spent raising my family. I put my career breaks front and center, and I reported my productivity metrics to account for my time away from work.
The result: My first application after I made the adjustments yielded a tenured position...Reframing my track record undoubtedly helped. Here's how I did it.
Read more at
http://womeninastronomy.blogspot.com/2015/06/addressing-career-breaks-head-on-in-cvs.html
Back to top.4. Bright Sky, Starry City: An Illustrated Love Letter to Our Communion with the Cosmos, Celebrating Women Astronomers
From: John Mather [johncm12_at_gmail.com]
by Maria Popova
When trailblazing astronomer Maria Mitchell began teaching at Vassar in the 1860s, where she was the only woman on the faculty, the university's official handbook forbade female students from going outside after dark - a dictum of obvious absurdity in the context of teaching astronomy. Although the rule was overturned and Mitchell went on to pave the way for women in science, a century and a half later a different civilizational absurdity obstructs aspiring astronomers of any gender - light pollution in cities is making it increasingly difficult to peer into the starry sky and take, to paraphrase Ptolemy, our fill of cosmic ambrosia.
In Bright Sky, Starry City (public library), author Uma Krishnaswami and illustrator Aimee Sicuro take on both of these issues - the expanding horizons for women in astronomy, the modern constrictions of light pollution - with great warmth and wonderment for the eternal allure of communing with the cosmos, of feeling our tininess and the enormity of life all at once, by the simple act of looking out into the glimmering grandeur of space.
Read more at
http://www.brainpickings.org/2015/05/12/bright-sky-starry-city/?mc_cid=4cd0784a5f&mc_eid=6ec9781ec2
Back to top.5. The First Black Female Astronaut On Fear, Audacity, And The Importance of Inclusion
From: Elysse Voyer [elysse.voyer_at_gmail.com]
By Lydia Dishman
On paper, Mae Jemison's accomplishments are so varied and groundbreaking, you would never stop to consider that she-like most all of us- isn't completely fearless.
Jemison studied chemical engineering at Stanford before going to medical school at Cornell. From there, she went into the Peace Corps as a medical officer for Sierra Leone and Liberia before becoming a general-practice physician in Los Angeles. An itch to keep exploring, something that Jemison admits has been with her since childhood, led her to NASA, where she became an astronaut and the first woman of color in the world to go into space, aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour, for its STS-47 Spacelab-J mission in 1992. Among her more recent ventures, Jemison's taught environmental science at Dartmouth, leads 100 Year Starship, an initiative to get humans to travel beyond our solar system within the next 100 years, started the Earth We Share science literacy project, serves as Bayer Corporation USA's national science literacy advocate, and is on the boards of Kimberly-Clark, Scholastic, and Valspar.
Along the way, she's learned a lot, from complex technical engineering to soft skills like patience.
Read more at
http://tinyurl.com/qb3hu43
Back to top.6. Bias against women in science persists, even in egalitarian societies
From: Elysse Voyer [elysse.voyer_at_gmail.com]
by Roheeni Saxena
A new international study published by researchers at Northwestern University and University of California-Berkeley found that even in nations with high gender equity, gender-based stereotypes continue to dominate science and technology fields, where scientists are still expected to be male.
For the last half-century, the percentage of women with careers in science has increased unevenly across countries. This allowed the researchers to perform a country-by-country examination of the relationship between gender stereotypes and the presence of women in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields. The question the researchers asked was simple: if subjects were to think of a scientist, are they more likely to put a man or a woman inside the lab coat?
Read more at
http://tinyurl.com/qyqmfs8
Back to top.7. 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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Back to top.8. How to Subscribe or Unsubscribe to the AASWOMEN newsletter
Join AAS Women List by email:
Send email to aaswlist+subscribe_at_aas.org from the address you want to have subscribed. You can leave the subject and message blank if you like.
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Back to top.9. Access to Past Issues
http://www.aas.org/cswa/AASWOMEN.html
Each annual summary includes an index of topics covered.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected].
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