Posted for Zeeya Merali
The lack of women in astronomy (and physics) is being highlighted this week at the She is an Astronomer conference at the Royal Astronomical Society in London. The meeting was opened yesterday by Jocelyn Bell Burnell, the first female president of the UK’s Institute of Physics.
Bell Burnell has become a symbol of the fight against sexism in the physical sciences. As a postgraduate student, she famously discovered the existence of pulsars with her supervisor Antony Hewish — earning Hewish (but not her) a share of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1974. She succinctly outlined the problem facing female astronomers: “You have to be a stubborn old git to get by in this field.”
There is a large variation in the numbers of female astronomers seen around the world, says Bell Burnell. In 2009, the proportion of females in the International Astronomy Union ranged from 35.8% in Argentina to 5.5% in Japan. English-speaking countries tended to cluster around the middle of that range.
There is no simple or single explanation for this geographical variation. France scored relatively high at 24.3% and there were mutterings among the conference delegates that this could be a reflection of the historical popularity of female-only education in the country. However, Italy, which does not promote female-only education fared even better (24.7%) and the explanation there was that within Italy, astronomy is regarded as a “low status” profession that is suitable for women.
“The conclusion that I draw from this is that there are many cultural reasons that affect whether women stay in astronomy, but it’s not our brains,” says Bell Burnell.
She is particularly frustrated by suggestions that women should be trained to be more assertive to progress: “The assumption there is that women are deficient, when actually it’s science that needs to change.”
The meeting reminded me of the work of a group of anthropologists I recently spoke to while looking into an article on the sociology of CERN. The statistics for women in astronomy are far less grim than those for particle physics, according to Sharon Traweek at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has spent almost 30 years studying how (in)hospitable particle physics laboratories are for women and minorities.
Traweek and Mia Ong at TERC, an education research collaborative in Cambridge, Massachusetts, work to retrain hostile behaviour out of physicists. “The first challenge is to get physicists to see that physics is a culture – many physicists assume they are just brains with hands doing science objectively,” says Ong.
Ong recounts unwitting sexist behaviour she has repeatedly observed in physics labs: “A young man and young woman go to a male supervisor for clarification. Very quickly I have seen the supervisor will physically turn his back to the woman and direct his answers to the male,” she says. Similarly, when a male student asks a question, he receives a focussed response; in contrast, supervisors tend to reiterate simple background concepts when replying to a female, “making her feel like a kindergartner”, says Ong.
Jarita Holbrook, an anthropologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson describes the detrimental effect of seemingly innocuous terms that are routinely used in letters of recommendation to refer to females and minority candidates. For instance, references for female students emphasise that they are “serious-minded” – as though this is remarkable – yet contain little substantive information.
Similarly African Americans are regularly labelled “hard-working”.“The implication is that African Americans are lazy, so it is noteworthy that this person isn’t, and there’s a stigma that this person isn’t brilliant,” says Holbrook. For Asians, Ong adds, the term “loyal” crops up, which holds negative connotations of “subservience” and a lack of initiative.
“Unconscious bias” is the buzzword thrown round to explain such behaviour. “It’s a nice term that allows you to let people you admire off the hook,” says Holbrook. “But it has to be stopped.”