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Can Minorities Break Astronomy's Glass Ceiling?

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Can Minorities Break Astronomy's Glass Ceiling? Can minorities break astronomy’s glass ceiling? At last year’s American Astronomical Society meeting in Washington, D.C., Dave Eicher, editor of Astronomy and Rich Talcott, senior editor, met with a small group of astronomers to discuss the state of the AAS Minorities Committee. Here follows a full-length version of this conversation. For additional insight into the state of minorities in the field of astronomy, visit the Committee on the Status of Minorities in Astronomy’s website and learn about minority resources, issues, and CSMA members at www.astro.wisc.edu/csma. Also, to learn about the Committee on the Status of Women in astronomy, check out www.aas.org/~cswa. You can also learn about the women’s role in physics by visiting the Committee on the Status of Women in Physics website, http://www.aps.org/educ/cswp/index.html. And be sure to access Ann Finkbeiner’s article on Astronomy.com, “Good morning gentlemen, and Meg.” Eicher: Welcome, everyone. Thank you for coming and let’s start by asking everyone to introduce him or herself and talk a little bit about what you do. Please describe what you are now doing with the Committee on the Status of Minorities in Astronomy (CSMA) and what the committee’s goals are. Stassun: I’m Keivan Stassun, a postdoc at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a Hubble Fellow. What we’re doing is a number of things, but we’re mostly just trying to launch the committee with a number of efforts. Phase 1, which is culminating at this meeting, is to enhance the visibility and awareness of the committee, and to get out a newsletter called Spectrum. We’ve had our first ever session at this meeting. And we had a mixer last night. We’re hoping that over the next year or so we’ll get more of the AAS community involved in writing for our newsletter and contributing to it, and engaging with the community. We hope more AAS members will be aware of us and will care to get involved. Urry: I’m Meg Urry. I’m director of physics at Yale University and director of the Yale Center of Astronomy and Astrophysics. I chair the American Astronomical Society Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy, which has been in existence for about 25 or 27 years. I edit our newsletter Status. We try to put into the newsletter information about whether there are still difficulties for women in astronomy, bolstered by relevant studies from other areas — not necessarily science — from other male-dominated fields to help women to acquire the skills, the determination, the fortitude to keep going. Our activities include sponsoring sessions at AAS meetings, putting out a weekly e-mail, and so on. I think we’re at a more mature stage in the sense that we’ve developed a community. And so we’re looking forward to helping the Minorities Committee leverage on whatever we’ve been able to do. Everyone’s progress is slower than I would like, but I think you can make faster progress than we did. Why not try to accelerate everyone together? Knezek: I’m Patricia Knezek, the WIYN Instrumentation Project Manager and am presently employed by NOAO. I am the co-editor, along with Meg Urry, of the AAS women’s electronic weekly newsletter containing things of interest to women in astronomy. I’m interested in learning from the new committee about some new ideas about what we can accomplish and about new ways to accomplish things because progress has always been about interaction. I’m also interested in putting this into a lower education level because I was a high school teacher for a while and I’m involved in K-12 outreach and I’m very interested in encouraging women and minorities into our field. Koerner: I’m David Koerner, an astronomer at the University of Pennsylvania, and I have been involved with gay and lesbian astronomy issues for a while. A small group has existed for some time, and now we finally have a link on the Minority Status web page — the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer Astronomers (GLBTQastro) link. This link leads to a kind of independent support group that has existed for a number of years, mostly as an Internet distribution list, which I helped found almost a decade ago. I went to grad school at Caltech, and there’s a small network of support there for gays and lesbians in science. There I met the first other astronomers and decided that we wanted to talk about astronomy-related issues. So we began a distribution list and it grew to almost 100 members. We have regularly had our own social get-togethers at AAS meetings for a while now, but they’ve been completely independent of the AAS. We’re very excited that the minorities committee will become more active, and also that now they seem open to letting us in under the umbrella of a minority. We have distinct issues from other minorities in terms of demographics; for us it’s mostly a support issue. Eicher: We have in essence three partly overlapping groups. Rich, and others, please feel free to jump into the conversation and redirect things as needed. I wonder if you could each start talking a little about each of the three committees and where you see their missions. Where do you see things going a year, two, three, five years from now? In terms of what you hope to accomplish? If you would like to comment on how Astronomy magazine would be able to help with those goals, please do. Urry: The situation for women is a little different than the situation for minorities and probably even farther apart from the situation for gays and lesbians. The numbers of women in astronomy have been growing. It’s now appreciable. A quarter of all the Ph.D.s, a quarter of the grad students, are women. You come to a meeting like this and you see lots of women. In my early days, 20 years ago, you didn’t. So we’ve now progressed to where the numbers have gone up. Our issues are about how there are more subtle discriminations. The attrition of women is still higher than that of men at every level, such that women are not accorded the respect that men are. The expectations for women are lower. You won’t be as bright, or whatever. So we’re confronting issues like that, which I think in some ways are a second order effect. It used to be simply to get in the door. We’re in the door now, and now we want our fair share of the playground. Eicher: There’s still extra proving of oneself to do. Urry: Yes, very much so. And when you get a little older, you see that those of us who have managed to pass through the little barriers, you hear things that are a little surprising. I mean, never does anyone say “We can’t hire her, she’s a woman.” Never. Stassun: We’ve educated people enough so that they know what not to say. [Laughter] Urry: They’ll say, “She’s really good.” And then they come to the guy. “He’s terrific!” Eicher: The problems are a little more disguised, but still there. Urry: It‘s harder to see. So step one ought to be increasing the numbers of minorities, but numbers are not the answer. Even if we were fifty-fifty it wouldn’t be a full answer. Because we still have the perception that men are the leaders at every high-level profession. Stassun: I should echo that the minorities committee is still in its infancy in the sense that we may not even be at first order issues. We’re at zero-order issues. The disparity in representation is so extreme. Often when I sit down with others to talk about the basic issues, they ask, “What are the numbers? I always thought it was 2 percent rather than 1 percent.” And I always say, okay, the bean counting is important, but let’s not lose sight of the fact that it’s an order of magnitude problem. If there’s one thing I would want to get across, it’s that. I mean that, we know from the 2000 U.S. Census numbers, that blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans together make up about twenty-five percent of the population. And yet they make up about two-and-a-half or three percent of the permanent astronomy world. That’s a factor of ten reduction. And so that’s the chasm that ultimately we hope to bridge. I want to impress a level of gravity on that. In a sense, then, we can almost do no harm in terms of what we try to do. Eicher: Progress needs to be made in many areas. Stassun: Effort at every level is required. Perhaps the greatest schism in minority representation is the K-12 problem. There is attrition at every level in the pipeline. It may seem funny to use the word “attrition,” in the context of children, but that really is where we have the hardest time. It really is getting minority kids involved. Eicher: Irrespective of their interest in science at that level? Because teaching science at that level is essentially nonexistent. Stassun: There are so many factors involved here, and getting into them all can sound so depressing. But it’s everything from the way that race and ethnicity in our country correlate with socioeconomic status, and the way that status correlates with quality of education.
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