NASA changes how it divvies up telescope time to reduce gender bias

The switch to double-blind peer review will affect roughly 650 scientists working on projects worth an estimated US$55 million.
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  1. Alexandra Witze
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NASA has changed the way that reviewers evaluate requests for viewing time on the agency’s space telescopes in an effort to reduce gender and other biases. It now uses a ‘double-blind’ system, in which neither the proposer nor the reviewer knows who the other is.

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Nature 571, 156 (2019)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-02064-y

Updates & Corrections

  • Clarification 03 July 2019: The Swift Observatory includes several telescopes, one of which detects γ-rays.

References

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