Nature Astronomy Focus: Gender equity in astronomy
Equity and inclusion of all in the scientific process would ensure a true diversity of ideas, which is paramount for exploiting the full potential of our community to make new discoveries. Despite this relatively universally accepted Ansatz, women and other under-represented groups still face both direct and indirect obstacles in their pursuit of a career in astronomy and space science. Discrimination based on gender, skin colour, disability, sexual orientation and other minority statuses persists in our society at large but also in the microcosm of astronomy, astrophysics and planetary science communities.
In this Focus issue of Nature Astronomy we put the spotlight on the issue of equity (or lack thereof) in our community by inviting comments on the different manifestations of this persistent discrimination. The data presented by our authors paint a worrying picture. A dense network of often subconscious and therefore insidious biases and discriminatory behaviours lead to very real deficiencies in the representation of women and minority astronomers in almost every aspect of scientific discourse (from conferences to missions, career prizes and citation counts).
The Focus is centred on a research Letter by Neven Caplar and collaborators that asks the question whether women-led papers are cited differently than papers led by men. The answer is yes: with machine-learning techniques accounting for non-gender specific attributes, women-led papers are cited systematically 10% less than their men-led equivalents. This deficit is not surprising and in line with similar findings in other scientific fields. Finally, Chanda Prescod-Weinstein offers her Perspective on the issue of intersectionality and how astronomers at the intersection of multiple minority statuses suffer exponentially more and yet often fall through the cracks of statistical studies such as the one conducted by Caplar et al.
Please click through the content of this Focus (links to free-access PDF files in the "Read more" tabs) and once you've finished reading it, you are invited to move to the "Further Reading" section, where a wealth of additional information awaits your perusal.
Our Focus issue contains four Comments on the status of women in astronomy contributed by astronomers who have devoted their time to quantify the manifestation of discrimination against women in our community.
"Implicit bias in astronomy" by Pat Knezek deals with the subconscious bias that exists in everyone and that creates the tendency for people to revert to deeply held stereotypes and normative behaviours when under stress (for instance, instinctively coming up with a list of top 5 astronomers that contains only men). Knezek goes a step further and looks at the statistics of prizes awarded by the American Astronomical Society, showing that there is a clear under-representation of women in the most prestigious prizes of the Society, which exists in addition to the general under-representation of women members of the Society compared to their population representation.
"Diversity and inclusiveness in large scientific collaborations" by Sara Lucatello and Aleksandar Diamond-Stanic summarizes some of the most interesting findings of a large-scale demographic survey of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Consortium. Being one of the largest international collaborations in astronomy, a survey of this size offers unique advantages and a snapshot of the international astronomical community over similar more localized surveys. Lucatello and Diamond-Stanic find that women are under-represented in the collaboration and in senior positions (compared to the parity in the general population). Moreover, the fact that women come preferentially from well-educated families shows that the barrier for women to enter the collaboration is higher than for men.
"Participation of women in spacecraft science teams" by Julie Rathbun presents the statistics of women astronomer participation in NASA's robotic space missions. Membership in such missions is highly prestigious and offers a leg-up to one's career in the field (due to increased opportunities for high-impact publications, presentations in important conferences, to name but a few). Rathbun finds that women astronomers are under-represented in these missions both compared to their membership in the American Astronomical Society and to their population representation. Moreover, while there has been an upward trend in the last couple of decades, very recent missions do not show a much higher fraction of women than those some ten years back.
"Who asks questions at astronomy meetings?" by Sarah Schmidt and James Davenport asks the simple question of how discussion time is distributed in conferences between men and women participants. The authors find that men typically dominate the discussion, especially when the available time for questions is very short. They do observe a trend for longer question sessions to lead to a higher participation of women that reaches their representation in the conference participation for Q&A session of 6 questions or more. This result showcases again the higher barrier (both external and potentially internal) that women face in their everyday scientific life.
In our Editorial, "Not all scientists are raised equal", we highlight the fact that apart from the very real and egregious difficulties that women astronomers face, one cannot forget that there are other axes of discrimination (race, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, etcetera) and people at the intersection of two or more of these axes suffer exponentially more. It is clear that a concentrated and focused effort is required for the situation to improve. National and international societies, research institutions, universities, funding agencies, publishers and ultimately anyone participating in the scientific process needs to be aware of all the biases lurking within our minds and work towards a more equitable future for astronomy.
