A new generation of scientists are challenging the biased, hierarchical status quo.
Some years ago I made up a list of things I was tired of reading in profiles of women scientists: how she was the first woman to be hired, say, or to lead a group, or to win some important prize. I had just been assigned a profile of a splendid woman astronomer, and her “firsts” said nothing about the woman and everything about the culture of astronomy: a hierarchy in which the highest ranks have historically included only scientists who are male, white and protective of their prerogatives.
These women astronomers are scientifically and culturally ambitious, and they shine of their own light; they sparkle. Their world still has restrictions but not as many, and the women react to them more defiantly. “We don’t want to change ourselves to fit the mold,” says Ekta Patel, a Miller postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, who simulates the behavior of satellite galaxies.
But in the 1960s and 1970s a series of court decisions, affirmative-action policies, laws and executive orders mandated that universities no longer exclude women and minorities for either study or employment. By the time Urry got her Ph.D. in 1984, some constraints on Rubin’s world were illegal, and others were publicly deplored.
Institutions and professional societies increasingly adopted the Baltimore Charter’s ideas, including offering affordable child care and parental leave, adapting tenure deadlines to family circumstances and publishing codes of conduct. Prizes began to allow self-nomination, avoiding some of the bias of the nomination process.
When she was a postdoctoral researcher, Casey heard advice from senior scientists about navigating academia: “Work extra hard. Take telecons at 4 A.M. Put your head down until you’re safe.” She and her friends, also in junior positions, thought the advice was bad. They told one another, “That’s a load of crap. Why don’t we do our own thing and see if we get hired?” She was hired. As a new faculty member, she was again advised against activism before tenure.
When people in the audience at a presentation ask questions belligerently, Berg responds, “Do you feel better? Can I continue?” Catherine Zucker—Ph.D. 2020, a Hubble fellow at STScI who works on the interstellar medium—redirects: “I just say, ‘Let’s touch base afterward,’ and no one ever does.” Kathryne Daniel, Ph.D. 2015, an assistant professor at Bryn Mawr College who works on theoretical galactic dynamics, says when she is sexually harassed, “I let them pretend it didn’t happen, [or] I say, ‘You must be so embarrassed.’ There are no robust ways of reporting that protect the reporter.”
A partial solution, beginning in 2018, has been to implement a system of “dual-anonymous” proposal review, that is, one in which neither the reviewers nor the proposers know the other group’s identities. The major funding agencies and observatories now use dual-anonymity, and although the results are based on a small sample, the success rates of women’s proposals seem to have gone up, albeit not dramatically.
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