Astronomy
First, I want to give a brief shout-out to those who attended the DPS Women's Lunch at last week's DPS Meeting in Pasadena! I found it to be a great opportunity to network and share ways to support fellow women astronomers. Susan Niebur has a nice recap of some meeting highlights at the Women in Planetary Science Blog.
I recently read Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell. The premise of the book is basically that those we consider geniuses didn't really get there strictly on talent alone. Rather, luck, opportunity, and hard work play as much, if not a larger role than any innate ability.
An example of luck might be being born just after the cutoff date for youth sports teams: Gladwell demonstrates that NHL players' birthdays are heavily biased toward the beginning of the year for precisely this reason. Opportunity is like Bill Gates' middle school PTA buying a computer. Hard work is summed up in Gladwell's 10,000 hour rule, which says that it takes that many hours of practice to become and expert at something.
It isn't too far a stretch to apply the same ideas to the question of women and minorities in science. If factors such as luck, opportunity, and hard work play such a large role in creating geniuses, then unluckiness, misguidance, and discouragement clearly play a role in preventing people from achieving as well.
Let us consider the case of a hypothetical Jane, who is quite bright, but whose parents never even consider that she might use a computer, who is encouraged to follow her proclivities in writing rather than science, who pays a high social cost for devoting herself to her studies, and who experiences hostility from her male peers for beating them at what they consider their own game. Her brother John, who is equally bright, might be presented with different opportunities and encouragement. Would it then be any wonder that Jane might be directed toward becoming an English major while John studies math and science?
All this supports arguments that expanding opportunities for minorities and women and encouraging them to pursue math and science are effective ways to increase their representation. The question, really, is how to put that into practice.
- Challenging The Status Quo In Utah
I read an interesting article in the on-line Daily Herald about efforts to attract more women to science and technical fields at Utah Valley University (UVU) in Orem, Utah. The study contains a number of specific and reasonable suggestions for how...
- Scientific Computing Versus Computer Science
I recently attended a local meeting on women in computer science, at the invitation of someone I met at a different meeting on high performance computing. Not that I consider myself a computer scientist, rather I'm more of a scientific computationalist,...
- Behind The Scenes
(The author of this post wishes to remain anonymous. I hope you find her experiences encouraging! -Hannah) I am a female postdoc at a major research university. I'm at the point in my career now where I'm having quite a few 'first' experiences:...
- Field Theory
This week, I had the pleasure of playing in the Mud Cup, the semi-annual soccer game played between the two departments at my former place of employment. One of the rules we have adopted is that each team must field a minimum of two women at any time....
- Christina Hoff Sommers Hates Women Scientists
Christina Hoff Sommers is at it again: claiming that applying Title IX to science will ruin America, just as she did around this same time last year, as discussed in previous issues of AASWOMEN: see here, here, and here. She starts off like this: What's...
Astronomy
Outliers
First, I want to give a brief shout-out to those who attended the DPS Women's Lunch at last week's DPS Meeting in Pasadena! I found it to be a great opportunity to network and share ways to support fellow women astronomers. Susan Niebur has a nice recap of some meeting highlights at the Women in Planetary Science Blog.
I recently read Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell. The premise of the book is basically that those we consider geniuses didn't really get there strictly on talent alone. Rather, luck, opportunity, and hard work play as much, if not a larger role than any innate ability.
An example of luck might be being born just after the cutoff date for youth sports teams: Gladwell demonstrates that NHL players' birthdays are heavily biased toward the beginning of the year for precisely this reason. Opportunity is like Bill Gates' middle school PTA buying a computer. Hard work is summed up in Gladwell's 10,000 hour rule, which says that it takes that many hours of practice to become and expert at something.
It isn't too far a stretch to apply the same ideas to the question of women and minorities in science. If factors such as luck, opportunity, and hard work play such a large role in creating geniuses, then unluckiness, misguidance, and discouragement clearly play a role in preventing people from achieving as well.
Let us consider the case of a hypothetical Jane, who is quite bright, but whose parents never even consider that she might use a computer, who is encouraged to follow her proclivities in writing rather than science, who pays a high social cost for devoting herself to her studies, and who experiences hostility from her male peers for beating them at what they consider their own game. Her brother John, who is equally bright, might be presented with different opportunities and encouragement. Would it then be any wonder that Jane might be directed toward becoming an English major while John studies math and science?
All this supports arguments that expanding opportunities for minorities and women and encouraging them to pursue math and science are effective ways to increase their representation. The question, really, is how to put that into practice.
- Challenging The Status Quo In Utah
I read an interesting article in the on-line Daily Herald about efforts to attract more women to science and technical fields at Utah Valley University (UVU) in Orem, Utah. The study contains a number of specific and reasonable suggestions for how...
- Scientific Computing Versus Computer Science
I recently attended a local meeting on women in computer science, at the invitation of someone I met at a different meeting on high performance computing. Not that I consider myself a computer scientist, rather I'm more of a scientific computationalist,...
- Behind The Scenes
(The author of this post wishes to remain anonymous. I hope you find her experiences encouraging! -Hannah) I am a female postdoc at a major research university. I'm at the point in my career now where I'm having quite a few 'first' experiences:...
- Field Theory
This week, I had the pleasure of playing in the Mud Cup, the semi-annual soccer game played between the two departments at my former place of employment. One of the rules we have adopted is that each team must field a minimum of two women at any time....
- Christina Hoff Sommers Hates Women Scientists
Christina Hoff Sommers is at it again: claiming that applying Title IX to science will ruin America, just as she did around this same time last year, as discussed in previous issues of AASWOMEN: see here, here, and here. She starts off like this: What's...