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 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. All those things come together and multiply. And so as one of the active members of this community, I’m very sensitive, at least in our initial salvo, in issues that relate to K-12 education. Within the AAS, I’m trying to focus on those aspects of the problem that seem feasible and understandable. In the short term, I see us as identifying strategies that my colleagues can understand and feel they can actually do something about. I often worry that telling people that we have to improve math and science teaching in the fourth grade makes people say, “Oh yeah, I agree with that, but unfortunately there’s nothing I can do about it.” And then people go away. So, for example, issues we are focusing on immediately include trying harder to bring astronomy to minority undergraduate students. To the institutions they attend. And, conversely, we can try harder to bring the students to us. What we mean by that is, on the one hand, understanding that the vast majority of minorities who receive bachelor’s degrees in astronomy get them at minority- centered institutions. So if we want to increase the number of minorities who are already in the pipeline, as it were, who are already getting physics degrees, but we want to get into our graduate programs, we need to work harder to build bridges between the institutions. Currently the bridges between those types of institutions are either nonexistent or tenuous. It turns out that about eighty-five percent of minority physicists get physics degrees at historically black colleges and universities or Hispanic institutions. And in fact the top ten institutions that produce physics degrees among minorities are all historically black colleges. Unfortunately they are not the top breeding grounds for Ph.D.s in astronomy. So one of our initial efforts is to say, there is a pool, which may be small, but ultimately we will tap out that pool.

Eicher: But you can do a lot of good by vastly improving communication between the relevant groups.

Stassun: Exactly. There’s another, larger and even more underutilized pool, among minorities in science, and that is the two-year institutions. It turns out that a very large number of minorities enter higher education through the community college or two-year college route. A lot of minorities do a sort-of retooling at the two-year institutions with their math and basic science before transferring to four-year universities. So the vast majority of minorities in undergrad physics are at institutions that we tend to regard as not eager to be in touch with us. So this is one area where we can do much more as a professional society. Recognizing that and expanding the role is a key step. Another element we’ve been discussing is taking advantage of our Research Experiences for Undergraduates programs. These are programs that bring undergraduates in for the summer, hook them up with a mentor for eight or ten weeks, and get them involved. But historically those programs also tend not to do a very good job of drawing from colleges where the minority physics students are. We know that when students are involved in those summer research programs they are much more likely to apply to go on to graduate school in those institutions. They have an in, they have an advocate, and so on. So those are some simple strategies that can help. The other major issue that I see as pressing in the short term is debunking the popular myth that there’s so much sensitivity to the plight of minorities that if you’re a minority and you have a Ph.D., you are golden. It’s almost gotten to a point where I am hearing from people, you know, “Women are set, minorities are set, what’s going to happen to the white male? They’re becoming a dinosaur.” It’s really important for people to realize that that’s not at all what’s happened. In the first issue of Spectrum I included an article that was reprinted from the American Association of University Professors, that included a study that focused on to what extent minority scientists had it made. They said “Let’s not ask the institutions, let’s ask the minorities, and let’s ask the minorities you would expect to be most strongly recruited.” They went to the Ford Foundation and got their list of fellows, went to Hughes, and to a third organization, and asked the minority scientists about how strongly they were recruited. And they found, among postdocs and faculty members, not a single instance of someone who had been called up and recruited strongly. So the bottom line was that, despite a lot of talk and mythology, faculty search committees are still very pensive and still rely on very antiquated and status quo methods. It’s very much a sort-of old boy’s network. It’s whom you know, largely. They send out letters and at the bottom there’s a little statement about how women and minorities are encouraged to apply, but many times the committee members don’t seem to have any cognizance of their own institution’s affirmative action policies, and the word “search” is almost a joke. There’s no proactive effort to contact people, to identify people. And with minorities, despite their qualifications and credentials, these are often people who are simply not plugged into the network that would allow them to be swept into the process.

Urry: They’re not visible. You ask the committee and they’ll say, “Well, there are only five African-American astronomers,” and they’ll name all five. And what they name are people who are thirty years past their Ph.D. And there have been one or two Ph.Ds per year since that time to African-Americans, and they don’t know who they are, and they don’t see them. Eicher: And people tend to take the path of least resistance. So how do you get someone to actually change from defaulting to the easy, comfortable way of doing things?

Stassun: That’s right.

Urry: And it’s circular, because these great places think that “If someone were good, I would know about them. If I don’t know about them, they must not be good.” Stassun: So from the standpoint of our committee, we’re trying to recognize the path of least resistance as reality, and try to make it very easy for our colleagues to identify potentially qualified minorities. We’re compiling an online directory.

Urry: You have a great idea. If you only have one or two Ph.D.s a year for African- Americans, and I suppose it goes up to five or something including Hispanics, you could publish in every issue of Spectrum, a picture and a bio of the last such person to get a Ph.D. People from the society who read that would actually be educated by it.

Stassun: That’s a fantastic idea. What we are doing already is compiling our online directory. Here’s a name, an e-mail, and a one-line summary of their interests. The reason we’re doing this is, whether you’re trying to diversify your pool of colloquium speakers, or whether you’re searching for candidates for a job, look at this list and consider them. Those are the kinds of direct actions I see as valuable in the short term. Over the longer term, it really is an order of magnitude problem. Our Ph.D. production rate among minorities is about one, one-and-a-half, maybe two percent per year. So we have a long way to go.

Eicher: But you’ve identified productive things that you can do now. It’s a good start.

Talcott: How much do you see it as a problem of the society in general versus astronomy in particular?

Stassun: I think everyone who is involved in minority issues recognizes that the bulk of the problem is society in general. How we allocate resources, how we communicate, how we educate youth.

Eicher: Some of that is uncontrollable.

Urry: In the case of women, twenty years ago the number of girls who were taking appropriate math classes in high school was lower than it is today. So that has always been a problem. What concerns me is that my colleagues and I, who are in academia, we can have enormous influence over graduate and undergraduate problems. And relatively less influence over K-12. In the end, that’s not our arena. At the first level, I can say, I’ve got X number of graduate students who are women, but at least let me make sure they are treated properly. So they make it through with the right skills and competency. There’s a trickle down effect, too. As more women move farther up and succeed at higher levels, young girls look up and see that it’s possible. Having role models is enormously important. There’s a lovely story that Anne Kinney tells — she is now head of astrophysics for NASA — about how when she was at Madison for her undergraduate work she had never heard of a woman astronomer. She went to the library one day and saw a picture of Margaret Burbidge, who had just been elected president of the society, and it was like some gift. It was a woman she had never met, but the fact that she could be president of the American Astronomical Society when Anne aspired to be an astronomer, somehow made it all more realistic. When there’s a desert out there, with just a few oases, one or two stories can make a huge difference.

Koerner: It’s really startling to hear the others talk. We have no statistics. The whole idea that you could start in K-12 to encourage gays and lesbians …

[Laughter]

… Is an outrageous thought. Kids identify themselves as this minority much later, but the discrimination starts well in advance.

Eicher: There’s an added layer of complexity.

Koerner: The idea that we might have any statistical knowledge to support the magnitude of our problem is not even possible. But we know anecdotally a fair amount. A large number of professionals “come out,” so to speak, and identify themselves as gay, often as undergraduates. Because to realize it they need to get separated from their family situation. It can be incredibly traumatic, and I’ve seen it derail them on into grad school. I was told recently by a very high level astronomer something about women’s issues, and mentioned gay and lesbian issues to him. He said, “Well, there can’t be any discrimination there, because we don’t even know who you are.” The implicit assumption there is, “If we did, then there would be.”

[Laughter]

…“And make sure that we don’t know.” I’m exaggerating, but I don’t think it’s completely untrue.

Urry: I could have made the same statement. Not only do you not know your statistics because not everybody is out, but how could you document people’s attitudes…

Koerner: You’re right. I have no knowledge of that person’s motivation. And I’m sure it was mostly ignorance behind that statement, not any kind of malice. But my real point is the message that gets heard on the other end. And I have young students who come to me and say, “I don’t see any representation; I’m waiting for that.” Because things are not comfortable, there is no representation. Absolutely none. It hurts astronomy. Because if people feel unrepresented they are less productive, less confident, more tentative, less likely to go on if they don’t feel safe. A great deal of that feeling comes from the society at large. Astronomy at large, you would think, would be something of a safe haven. I think a lot of gay people see astronomy as a safe haven because the universe doesn’t call them names. I can think about the Big Bang or whatever and it doesn’t judge me.

Eicher: It’s a psychologically benign area.

Koerner: Yes, and yet I’ve heard lots of stories of peer discrimination where students feel there’s no recourse with faculty. They’re always so afraid of discrimination they feel they may jeopardize their career if their status is known. Even when I was applying for jobs my very well-intentioned mentor said to me, about my domestic partner, “That’s information you don’t need to volunteer.” I think that’s right politically, but it’s a psychological handicap to have to carry around. You wouldn’t believe how many ways you try to think of referring to a significant other without any reference to gender whatsoever. It was hideous, and it made the situation very difficult to continue in an interview. It’s a hostile environment. And then all institutions have their little social functions. Do you participate or not? To some extent, if you don’t, little by little, you’re seen as not really being part of the group. If you do, it’s always some rite of passage for coming out. First of all, being identified as gay, then bringing my partner to the faculty luncheon. Usually it’s okay if you do. But it can be a huge issue if you’re not assured that all will be fine.

Urry: It seems to me that it would be really tough that you dissipate a lot of your energy maintaining this bubble of invulnerability. That’s identical to the situation for women and minorities. All the women I know are spending half their time trying to build themselves back up because they feel abraded by the system.

Eicher: The emotional energy you need to spend on that is fantastic.

Urry: That’s absolutely right. On the other hand, to say a positive thing, men aren’t self-aware. They don’t ever have to look at how they relate to the rest of the world. And so they haven’t done that kind of self-examination. And so for women, in some ways, it should be considered a strength. We all have to do that because we’re the odd person out.

Koerner: It places a great demand on your individuality too, and individuality is not a bad thing.

Knezek: When I was teaching high school I left graduate school for a year and we had nearly all women teachers. There was one male teacher in our school, and it was very interesting to watch the interaction of this one man with fifty women teachers. When I returned to graduate school it was my wish that every male grad student would spend one week with all women to see what their reaction would be. Because we’re so ingrained in the way it is now. Stassun: There’s the issue of visibility. When we were having dinner the other night one of the other people with us caught the issue very well. All it takes is a little bit of paranoia and no sign of visible support. And that’s enough to damage things.

Koerner: When our support group started it consisted entirely of grad students. No one knew of any faculty member anywhere who was publicly identified as gay or lesbian.

Urry: There’s now the web site, right?

Koerner: Yes, but what was really kind of dramatic was the time when we had that. We were a bunch of grad students and then some of us were postdocs. And people thought, “Wow — hey, we’ve reached the postdoc level!” And it was always a really big event when one of us would pop through and become an openly gay faculty member. And you could count them on one hand, but those of us who were there knew what a struggle it was. We felt proud when it was professionally safe, though a lot of people still don’t feel that way.

Urry: I was actually tipped off by a women who led me to this web site, I didn’t know it existed. I have a number of friends in the community who are gay or lesbian. What was stunning to me was how few of them are on that list. They’re still not comfortable or are at a place in their career when they feel they can’t be open about it. A few, from the get-go, are comfortable with it. But most have trepidation. Of the people who are out, what is the response to them? Is there hostility or is it well accepted?

Koerner: It’s tense. The existence of the list at all is problematic. They don’t like to feel like they’re being made less courageous by not being on it. Also, just the visibility itself is threatening if you want to stay invisible. And in fact one of the most important things for us is for the gay and lesbian community to have an officially recognized liaison because up to that point a lot of people will not become associated with it because they feel it’s a sure way to become blacklisted.

Urry: Has that ever happened? Has it ever blown up in someone’s face to come out?

Koerner: I think it’s a changing landscape, and originally, absolutely — it would’ve been the stupidest thing to do. One of the very first Supreme Court cases over discrimination was about security clearance for a gay man who was an astronomer. And he was fired for being gay. And so a lot of people were and are most comfortable with complete invisibility. Now officially that’s changed. Again, it’s one of those things that we can’t quantify, but anecdotally there are lots of stories. I would like to hope that the situation is changing. There are a lot of places that are safe but you wouldn’t know. Stassun: The point about the lack of visible support is critical. I wonder if the number of gay and lesbian astronomers is the same as in the general population. Let’s assume that astronomy is representative. And then ask how does the number of out gays and lesbians compare to that of the general population?

Koerner: I would suspect that getting a statistic on the general population would be much harder than getting one in astronomy.

Urry: Well, there are numbers. Is it 10 percent? You said there are 100 in your group.

Koerner: That’s in our group. Not all of those people are completely out. So that’s not the total fraction. A lot of people who are self-identified are afraid to be on that list. And the list is not public, nor will it be, and even with that the majority of them would be afraid to be on a public list.

[Van Dixon joins the conversation]

Dixon: Hello, I’m Van Dixon, and I’m involved with the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer Astronomers (GLBTQastro) group. I’ve been involved with organizing dinners so that like-minded people can meet each other and share their concerns and issues.

Eicher: Since you’ve been involved, how has the attitude of the AAS changed toward your group?

Dixon: Until quite recently, we were the love that doesn’t speak its name. There was never any mention of us. Up until now, our community has not had the confidence to even approach the Society and ask for it. Only now, partly due to social change generally, are we able to ask recognition for ourselves. My first e-mail from the member chair of that committee was not very encouraging.

Eicher: What you met was resistance.

Dixon: What I met was an explanation of the status quo and the difficulty of recognition, which of course I knew, and not any apparent support for bridging that.

Urry: I don’t want to defend what I know not, but my guess is that most of the Society has been unaware of the committee.

Dixon: But people in general aren’t unaware that there’s a gay and lesbian issue.

Urry: Let me finish. It may be resistance but I don’t think its hostility. This chair that you contacted was not an active type.

Dixon: I understand. Urry: So we want to minimize the difficulties faced by gay and lesbian astronomers. Most people have not confronted the issues. That they should have is certainly true. But they haven’t confronted it so they haven’t come out and said they’re opposed in any way. That’s a problem right there, but it’s a different problem.

Dixon: I’ll provide an example. I’m hosting a dinner, and I want people to know about it, so they can meet each other. This is a very basic thing that people want to do. We tried for years to get this in the bulletin. We heard that “It’s not really appropriate to talk about that sort of thing.” And so even today I meet people and they say, “What group?” And we’ve been doing this for years, and that’s a shame. It’s a very helpful thing, this dinner, to bring people together so they can meet and figure out how to live in this world.

Urry: Did you bring this thing to the council, Van?

Dixon: Remember that you have to be someone with tenure to approach someone on the council. There are very few of us who are confident enough to call someone and talk about it. My understanding is that someone talked to someone and that’s the answer they got.

Urry: That’s not right. The notion that you don’t publish in the bulletin the notice for everyone’s group dinner is correct. But this is a different issue. I didn’t realize it. You should have told me. I would have raised hell.

[Laughter]

Knezek: But you’re not always sure who will. This is one of the issues facing gay and lesbian astronomers that I’m seeing, is that they don’t know who to approach. The whole scene is so quiet. I only found out about the group through a good friend of mine who is gay. A couple of years ago I went along to an event, and I actually felt a little trepidation doing this even as a straight woman. Which is terrible because I support these issues completely. And so I wonder myself, if I were on the council, would I be strong enough and confident enough to be the advocate you guys need?

Urry: I would never take this to the council. I would never take anything the least bit problematic. But the executive committee, that might be different.

Dixon: One sort of problem that we’ve had is, that in general, maybe three times in ten years we’ve had some issue that we really thought was important and we wanted to rattle their cage about, but most of the people in our group are under thirty-five, under forty certainly, and are not in a position to rock the boat. And so we only have two or three people in our group who have tenured positions and feel they can sign a letter on our behalf. One thing I’m really excited about is that our group, working along with the Minorities Council, now has a platform to approach the larger community with our concerns. Without being anonymous or without having to work so hard to find someone to help us.

Eicher: Based on that, where do you see your group going; what do you see it doing, a year or several years from now?

Dixon: I think things are changing incrementally all the time. At this point our goals have to be far less ambitious than those of the other minorities. The actual official recognition by the AAS, allowing us to be visible to others in the community, is the main thing. That people who turn to us for support do not risk discrimination personally or professionally.

Urry: If I understand correctly, your group works by referral? Those wishing to join your group would have to be supported by a current member? Is that correct?

Koerner: It’s less a group than an e-mail list, but you have to write to the list manager and include your biography for the benefit of everyone else. So you need to introduce yourself.

Urry: You really have an island of friendliness. But you could have a much larger island of friendliness with straight people — that is, people who are sympathetic …

Koerner: We have straight people on the list, as supporters.

Urry: Well, I’m wondering if you want to create a category of people who are safe, but not necessarily gay, who would like to participate.

Koerner: We had a discussion about that five years ago and a lot of people were really concerned because they didn’t trust the situation.

Urry: Let’s say one of your members is going to interview somewhere. And you had on your friends’ list someone at that institution. That would be a very valuable piece of information. Someone they could discuss things openly with, maybe discuss the partner issue, that kind of stuff. I think it’s just getting to that level, where there are enough people who are willing to be friends to make a difference.

Knezek: I have a kid brother who goes to a high school where several years ago some kids started a gay-lesbian alliance group. This kind of thing never existed when I was in high school. On both sides, there’s a heightened awareness and comfort level. Just by this official recognition. That made a huge difference. There were only three or four students at the time who pushed for this, but the breakthrough affected the way everything happened. Now the group has a membership of about fifty-five. Potential barriers can be lowered significantly by this method. This has caused a definite increase in the comfort level of these people. Koerner: Since Keivan and I started talking a lot last summer about whether or not our group should be under the umbrella of the Minorities Committee, it’s become clear that their issues are really distinct from ours. So it’s a difficult fit. It would still be optimal for us to have our support group grow under the auspices of the Minorities Committee. We know that you too have visible mentors for support. I would think that amplifying that part of things with your own efforts, and including us and letting us learn from this, would be great. This would not require a lot of time but would have a very strong impact.

Stassun: I wonder if I can raise something that I think will resonate with all of us here. Perhaps it’s the strongest point of contact with all three of our groups. It may be of some interest to the magazine. In the context of minority issues, I’ve heard this referred to as “the minority tax.” What I mean by that is the fact that in academia, or in professional societies, at that level, the folks who care about and work on representation and equities and minority outreach and so on, are minorities. And that’s a burden that on one hand is sort of self-imposed, because we’re speaking as minorities, and on the other hand, is the tacit assumption by our colleagues that if anyone is going to do the minority outreach, it’s going to be the one minority faculty member. And this issue pervades all of our regimes, I think. On the one hand we are told that these sorts of activities matter really not at all, for career advancement, and that sort of thing, and yet it’s sort of expected. As we raise the awareness of these issues, people would like to see the issues addressed, but whom it falls on, are usually the very people who need the help.

Eicher: There’s something of an irony involved here.

Stassun: Right. And so you hear of evidence of women and minorities who need programs and efforts installed and succeeding, but they do that out of their own extra time and energy. And there are only so many hours in the day. And so what that means is fewer publications that you can get out. While your department may be very happy to have you work this way, they’re certainly not going to reward you for it.

Eicher: The burden is another penalty, yet again.

Group: That’s true. Very true. [Laughter]

Urry: One of the big breakthroughs we made at Space Telescope about ten years ago was that the director got religion about this. And so he used to ask on a hiring list, “So how many people on that list are women?” And the first two times he asked it they would turn to me! “How are we doing on women?” Why are you asking me?

[Laughter]

Urry: So clearly they thought it was my job. And it’s also true that whatever work I did in that arena was seen as time taken away from research. On the other hand, we have choices. So many of our colleagues don’t. When I was younger, maybe I used to resent the fact that some women astronomers weren’t very helpful to other women on this issue. And later I thought, it’s good that they do what they do, for several reasons. First of all if they do well scientifically, it’s good for all women. Second, the fact that they don’t work on these issues means they’re less threatening to the men and more welcomed. Men can develop a comfort level they maybe don’t have with me. So in the end, you need all kinds. We do this not because anyone is rewarding us but because we have a sort of passion for justice. And I’m frankly pissed off when I go to a meeting and all the speakers are men or I go into an organization that was formed in 1981 and ninety-five percent of the faculty is men. Come on! This is the twenty-first century! That’s why we’re doing it, and no one is going to stop us.

Stassun: What I’m referring to is not so much the women or the minorities that will not help us in our causes, but rather the majority of that group that will, oftentimes, say to me for example, “You know, Keivan, sometimes you just have to learn to say no.” And I’m thinking, if I say no, are you going to say yes? And the answer is no.

Dixon: It‘s very human to hire someone to fill a job and feel that you’ve fulfilled your obligation. And feel that you are somehow responsible for their success, yet they do all the work.

Urry: It’s like that Olympic event of bike racing with a team of four. There’s always a guy in front, and then he drops off and goes to the back, and lets someone else go. And that’s important for younger people. Take the heat for a while, do the work for a while. But then go off and take some more time, and let someone else take the heat for a while. If you can get a team that can do that, you’ve got a good arrangement.

Knezek: I’ve both agreed and disagreed with some of what Meg has said. You said, “We have the numbers.” I actually disagree with that, because we were talking percentages of population and a factor of ten and all that. Well, it’s still a factor of two for women. So I disagree that we’ve gotten to the point where the numbers are fair.

Urry: Yes, that’s true.

Knezek: I think we’ve leveled out. There are still women coming in, but there hasn’t been that much change in the last few years and there’s a lot of work to do. As someone who is working to come up into the headlights and take the hard knocks, one of the things I want to see is working hard to increase those numbers. I think we still need to work on that. Ten years from now the numbers may not be fifty-fifty, but they’ll be more balanced than they are now, we can hope.

Eicher: The numbers situation for women astronomers seems vastly better than it was ten, fifteen, or twenty years ago. Knezek: Yes, but they’re still not representative. To me this comes down to the issue Keivan was discussing, the larger society thing. We have to start addressing these issues. I have one very dear friend who is a lesbian women minority, and I keep telling her she would be perfect to get involved with this, because she covers all the bases.

[Laughter]

Urry: We have to address some of these issues with the public. This is where Astronomy magazine could play a real role, in showing people these are issues. Whatever your color, gender, if you think this is cool, come talk to us about the issues. The more we get this message out to the public, the better off we’ll be. I think we should be very radical, too. I have to say that for many years I was sort of like the poor relation who was satisfied with an insufficient amount of attention. You know, I get a little bit for dinner, can I have a little bit more? I think it was two years ago in Atlanta when we had the session on women in astronomy when someone got up and said, “Why are we talking about going from ten percent to twenty percent?” I thought, what is the right number? What is our goal? Any goal short of fifty-fifty is not rational. One has to push harder and ask for more. Ask for what’s right, not what you think you can get.

Dixon: One of the most insidious things we encounter is someone who says, “Well, things are getting better.” Slowly, but surely.

Eicher: So let’s not worry about it too much.

[Laughter]

Koerner: Right. That’s often what we encounter. Well meaning colleagues who don’t recognize what really has to be done to improve the situation. “I’m hearing more about it so it seems like it’s getting better, so everything’s okay.”

Stassun: That’s really not enough. We really need to insist on parity, on equity.

Koerner: It’s a fine line to walk. We can’t do things that will inflame psychological or sociological ignorance, and yet we can’t just assimilate to that either.

Stassun: One message that would be nice to get out is that, while we talk a lot and worry a lot about our slim numbers, that also presents an opportunity for leadership. To any young people who are considering a career in science, I would say that in astronomy there’s a lot of room for women, people of color, gays and lesbians, to have a good career. That’s not to say that they’ll have a free-and-easy ride, but opportunities will be there.

Talcott: In some ways it may be more important to make those more visible than the barriers. Knezek: Our last two AAS presidents have been women. There are gay and lesbian astronomers who are doing important research. There are prominent black astronomers, including the director of the Rose Center for Space. These people also serve as important role models. We’re working on it. We’re succeeding on some levels. We’ll be fifty-fifty someday.

Urry: There’s tension here. You don’t want to be too rosy, because then people think everything’s fine. You don’t want to be too negative because then you turn people off. It’s difficult to strike the right balance. When women come to me for advice I cannot actually tell them they won’t have any troubles. Or more troubles than their male peers do. On the other hand, I’m desperate that there be more women.

Eicher: Will they have more troubles in this field than in other fields of academia?

Urry: Chemistry graduates slightly more Ph.D.s to women than astronomy, but faculty hires in chemistry are quite a bit lower. So astronomy is doing pretty well. In the leadership positions of this society, women are very well represented. The situation compared to biology or medicine or law is much worse, however. And it’s changing slowly. So they do have alternatives, and many women are attracted to the beauty and cosmic glory of astronomy but are put off by the total impracticality of it. They want to be helpful to others as in medicine or biology.

Stassun: I also think that it’s critical to understand how much of this interest comes up in the early years. As we said before, that’s a little bit out of our area.

Urry: We could have a really good conversation with Janet Mattei, for example, about the role her organization [the American Association of Variable Star Observers] plays in the work of women and minorities. I’ve never discussed it with her.

Stassun: That’s a good point. Amateurs outnumber us. They probably have much stronger connections in some ways. And perhaps some stronger interplay between amateurs and professionals could help more women and minorities get involved.

Eicher: In the amateur community, which amounts to maybe thirty or forty thousand hardcore skygazers and another couple hundred thousand more casual types, the demographics are overwhelmingly white male. Maybe fifteen percent of the group consists of women. The lack of diversity, at least among the more advanced levels, is pretty striking. How do you get a more diverse group?

Knezek: What I try to do is to participate in star parties. You can’t underestimate the role of seeing women or minorities playing a part.

Stassun: I’m sure that the amateur community would respond, knowing that at our level, representation and diversity are important, how much people rely on encouragement in the early years. Our colleagues in the secondary schools may have the strongest role to play in this.

Urry: The web helps. In the last few weeks I’ve received a dozen or more e-mails from young girls who want to be a part of science and astronomy. They say “thank you” for being there, for giving them something to think about. They say, “I’m a high school student; I need to know how to be an astronomer, how did you get there,” and so forth.

Knezek: That helps a great deal, just providing that outreach.

Urry: What would happen if you went to Google and just typed, “gay and lesbian astronomers”?

Koerner: You do get our web site.

Urry: So people can find you.

Koerner: Yes.

Eicher: Can you each tell us a little about your astronomical research?

Stassun: My research is on star formation, in particular, when low-mass stars are being formed, what are the physical processes that come into play, that allow those stars to slow down their rotation rates such that they don’t end up spinning so fast that they tear themselves apart? We know that stars survive the formation process because they exist. But we still don’t really understand where the energy goes, in that process.

Urry: My expertise is in active galaxies, which are powered by supermassive black holes. I’m interested in a number of different issues. One of the cool things is the study of blazars, with their relativistic jets, and to observe them you need to observe at all wavelengths, so x-ray, UV, radio, optical, are involved. The reason is that I’ve been trying to figure out the demographics of black holes. How many black holes are there, and of what masses? How do they relate to the formation of galaxies? Did they form more or less at the same time as galaxies? You find black holes by finding active galaxies but dormant black holes exist in lots of other places.

Eicher: Will we find out, before NGST, which came first, stars, galaxies or black holes?

Urry: My prediction is that we won’t get it before NGST.

[Laughter] Knezek: I work primarily on low surface brightness galaxies and dwarf galaxies. My interest is in how galaxies of small scale evolved over the age of the universe. And how star formation on a larger scale impacts that evolution. This is an important question because low surface brightness galaxies are probably the most common galaxies. In terms of sheer numbers, understanding their role in the formation of larger galaxies is important. I’m also interested in the interaction of clusters and groups of galaxies. This is key to understanding how the universe has evolved over time. Where the peaks in star formation have occurred in the past. And on a more local scale, looking at dwarf galaxies that are forming only their first or second generation of stars gives us a window to the past to try to help us understand how the first stars formed. And what impacts they had immediately on their local environment. So we can understand what we’re seeing better at the higher redshifts.

Dixon: I look at low-mass stars at the ends of their lives. I look into globular clusters, very old objects, concentrating on a specific phase of stellar evolution called asymptotic giant branch stars. These are stars that have become red giants, they’ve blown away their outer atmospheres, and they’re heating up and contracting to become white dwarfs. We don’t really understand what happens when the stars blow away their atmospheres. What triggers this? How much mass gets blown away? What are all the churnings that go on in the atmospheres before this happens? So we’re trying to look at stars that have gone through this process, and then work our way back in time to look at the precursors. I do most of my work in the far ultraviolet, where most of these stars live.

Koerner: I work on the formation of planetary systems, doing observations of circumstellar disks. In the early phase we do it mostly with millimeter-wave interferometry with the VLA for the long wavelengths, and as the disks evolve, we want to find out, are they making planetary systems? We look at progressively older objects, we find that gas disappears, and we find that the remaining dust from indirect evidence. We’ve done a lot of work with the Keck telescope. We’re finding that a lot of objects have a multiple ring structure, asymmetries that suggest that planets have indeed formed. We’re quite excited about that. We’re continuing to look at the structure of those kinds of disks. On the other hand, in terms of planetary systems, we’re starting to define the populations of circumstellar objects. I’m very interested in substellar companions and have done surveys of companions to substellar objects themselves. We’re always searching for substellar companions to sun-like stars. In the next ten to fifteen years we want to build up that census of population. This will be a tremendous boon to telling us how planetary systems form. The driver for me is the commonly-posed question, “How habitable is the universe?” How many places can life exist? On that topic, I’ve written a book with a biologist, Simon LeVay, called Here Be Dragons: The Scientific Quest for Extraterrestrial Life. Biographies of the Participants

Meg Urry

Meg Urry is Professor of Physics at Yale University and Director of the new Yale Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics. Some current research interests include the mass function of black holes and the connection between active and normal galaxies.

Dr. Urry received a B.S. in physics and mathematics from (1977), and M.S. (1979) and Ph.D. (1984) degrees in physics and astronomy from , the latter for X-ray and ultraviolet studies done at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she moved to the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), which runs the for NASA.

Dr. Urry maintains a long-standing interest in the issue of women and minorities in science. She led the US delegation to the first International Conference on Women in Physics, held in Paris in March 2002. She chairs the Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy of the American Astronomical Society and is a member of the corresponding committee of the American Physical Society. She was a key organizer of the 1992 Conference on Women in Astronomy that gave rise to the Baltimore Charter. She and her husband, Dr. Andrew Szymkowiak, also a Yale physicist, have two daughters, Amelia (11) and Sophia (8). Van Dixon Patricia Knezek

Van Dixon is an Associate Research Patricia Knezek is a member of the Astronomer at Johns Hopkins University Committee on the Status of Women in in Baltimore, where he works with the Astronomy partly because her love of Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer astronomy overcame some ugly bumps (FUSE) project. His research includes along the way, but also because she’s observational studies of evolved stars in “had some remarkable men and women globular clusters and emission from hot to mentor me and provide role models.” gas within and between galaxies. She is on the CSWA to help future generations of women astronomers avoid some of those ugly bumps.

Ultimately, she views her role on CSWA as part of her involvement in teaching and outreach. She hopes that, “someday, when a child reads a book that starts with the words ‘The scientist found...’ that the picture that forms in the child’s brain isn’t automatically a white male in a lab coat, and he or she will be comfortable pursuing science as a career no matter what sex, race, or creed they may be.” David Koerner Keivan Guadalupe Stassun

David Koerner is an assistant professor Keivan Guadalupe Stassun received of astronomy at Northern Arizona B.A. degrees in physics and astronomy University. He received his B.S. in at the University of California at physics from Cal State University-Long Berkeley and a Ph.D. in astronomy from Beach, and both his M.S. and Ph.D. in the University of Wisconsin — Madison. Planetary Science from Caltech. After working at the University of Born in Los Angeles to Mexican Pennsylvania for four years, he left the immigrants, Stassun is the first member Ivy League for the west to simply be of his family to attend college. He closer to nature. promotes diversity through partnerships with Historically Black Colleges and David lives with his domestic partner, work in public schools. With amateur Gery Allan and two, 2-year-old Alaskan astronomers and the National Science Malamutes, Amarok and Illa. Teachers Association, he runs a national minority outreach and teacher- Some of David’s “hobbies” include training program called “Scopes for music — he was a concert pianist and Schools,” which puts real telescopes in violinist who competed in the 1982 the hands of teachers and minority Tchaikowsky Competition in Russia. His youth. interest in the Minorities Committee is to establish gay, lesbian, and bisexual Stassun, who has received awards from representation that will send a signal to the National Science Foundation and young GLB astronomers, one that will the Ford Foundation, is currently a free them from carrying an unjust NASA Hubble Fellow and a postdoctoral burden of covered-up identity for the researcher at U.W. Madison studying sake of career success. the formation and early evolution of low- mass stars.