One scholar was mistaken for a food server at a national meeting, treated as if she didn’t belong in the intellectual conversation. Another has watched women minimize their achievements in job interviews and worries that female scientists frequently undercut themselves. A graduate student who received sexually explicit poems from a colleague wonders if she should pursue a Ph.D.: Would that mean spending a career navigating a hostile environment?
In the field of astronomy, as in many scientific disciplines, women remain far outnumbered. Fewer than one in five professors in physics and astronomy departments — about 16 percent — are women, an imbalance that persists throughout the academic pipeline. Among students earning bachelor’s degrees in physics and astronomy, 20 percent are women, according to the American Institute of Physics, a proportion that remains about the same at the Ph.D. level.
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One scholar was mistaken for a food server at a national meeting, treated as if she didn’t belong in the intellectual conversation. Another has watched women minimize their achievements in job interviews and worries that female scientists frequently undercut themselves. A graduate student who received sexually explicit poems from a colleague wonders if she should pursue a Ph.D.: Would that mean spending a career navigating a hostile environment?
In the field of astronomy, as in many scientific disciplines, women remain far outnumbered. Fewer than one in five professors in physics and astronomy departments — about 16 percent — are women, an imbalance that persists throughout the academic pipeline. Among students earning bachelor’s degrees in physics and astronomy, 20 percent are women, according to the American Institute of Physics, a proportion that remains about the same at the Ph.D. level.
Four female astronomers, in different stages of their careers, talked with The Chronicle about their experiences and their aspirations, and about what it’s like to navigate a field in which they are such a clear minority.
The paucity of women in the sciences has made some of them feel like outsiders, frequently underestimated. And it has contributed to a climate in which harassment and bias have often been allowed to fester, a problem that attracted national attention again this year.
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In the spring, Sir Richard T. (Tim) Hunt, a biochemist and Nobel laureate, told a journalism conference in South Korea about his “trouble with girls” in the lab: “You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticize them they cry.” Female scientists mocked the remarks with a #DistractinglySexy campaign on Twitter, in which they posted photographs of themselves in lab coats and goggles.
In October, Geoffrey W. Marcy, a renowned astronomer at the University of California at Berkeley, resigned after he was found responsible for sexually harassing female students over a number of years. The allegations — and the university’s initial response, threatening to fire Mr. Marcy but only if he harassed more women — roiled the discipline.
Harassment and discrimination in higher education are so devastating, scholars say, because students depend so much on their faculty advisers for help — in applying to graduate school, selecting a research program, and eventually securing a faculty job.
“There is an incredibly narrow path to success,” says Katie Hinde, an associate professor of human evolutionary biology at Arizona State University. “Being a squeaky wheel, rocking the boat, or upsetting your adviser can potentially be catastrophic.”
As a result, many women who feel harassed don’t complain, says Ms. Hinde. A study she published last year, on scientists performing fieldwork in the physical and life sciences and in the social sciences, found that sexual harassment was abundant. Of the 516 women surveyed, 70 percent said they had experienced sexual harassment, including inappropriate remarks or jokes based on their gender. The study, one of only a few on individual scientists’ experiences with harassment, has been called a landmark. It has spurred scholars to undertake similar studies of harassment in laboratories and at academic conferences.
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As in astronomy, the proportion of female scholars in many science and engineering disciplines is small. But unlike fields like biology and chemistry, in which the pipeline for women leaks all the way from undergraduate programs to the professoriate, the proportion of women in physics and astronomy remains about even all along the way.
C. Megan Urry, a professor of physics and astronomy at Yale University, says the biggest barrier to women in astronomy isn’t necessarily sexual harassment. She acknowledges it’s a serious problem that severely harms some young women. But persuading women from the start that they are smart and accomplished enough to choose a physics or astronomy major is the biggest hurdle, she says.
“There are too many women missing from the field for harassment to be the major cause,” Ms. Urry says. “More people give up on physics and astronomy because they feel they don’t fit, or they are undervalued or underestimated.”
Women continually express doubts about whether they are capable of pursuing an astronomy career, Ms. Urry says: “I meet with really talented young women and they say, I may have made a mistake, I’m not sure I should be doing this.” A big part of that, she says, is that men in the field talk about how accomplished scholars must be to make it. “The more people in the field see themselves as incredibly gifted human beings,” she says, “the fewer women there are.”
Forty years ago, when Ms. Urry told her own undergraduate adviser at Tufts University that she wanted to be an astrophysicist, she recalls, he scoffed and said, “Oh, no. You’d have to be a genius.” And Ms. Urry’s reaction was much like those of the young women she speaks with today: “I thought, maybe I’ve made a mistake in wanting to do that.”
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Now she’s president of the American Astronomical Society.
Sara Seager: MIT Is One of the Few Places Where I’m Not Treated Differently
Sara Seager was 40 when her husband died, leaving her on her own to raise two small children and continue a high-profile career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. While grieving, she had to take over the grocery shopping and cooking, things she’d almost never done before. Her husband had been primarily a stay-at-home dad.
After several months of working double duty, she was exhausted. One day in 2012, when her dean asked how she was doing, she told him things weren’t working out. She might need to work part time, she said. Or maybe she would just quit.
His immediate response: How much money do you need?
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Ms. Seager was surprised by the question and didn’t have a ready answer. Like most research universities, MIT offers help to new parents, allowing faculty members a semester’s leave from teaching with full pay after the birth of a child and giving female scholars the option to extend their tenure clock by up to two years after the birth of a second child. But Ms. Seager had no idea she could ask for more money in a situation like hers.
How Women in Astronomy Can Navigate a Male-Dominated Field
Be a strong advocate for yourself.
Sara Seager, a professor of planetary science and physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, realized as a postdoc that she was sabotaging her career by being so helpful to other scientists, something she views as a dangerous tendency of female academics. “If you are constantly running models to help someone else,” she says, “you can’t get your own stuff done.” Women should also more actively promote their work, she says, and fight harder for things like first authorship.
Create regular opportunities to talk with one another.
Jedidah Isler, a postdoctoral fellow at Vanderbilt University, has started a Google hangout called Vanguard: Conversations With Women of Color in STEM, which hosts national online conversations for minority women in science and math. So far the group has had five online shows. During one of them, three women talked about how they fell in love with science, who had encouraged them along the way, and how they dealt with discouraging remarks.
Discuss harassment.
When news broke that a famous astronomer had been found responsible for sexually harassing undergraduate women, Emily M. Levesque, an assistant professor of astronomy at the University of Washington, put aside the regular agenda of a graduate-student club she advises and focused its next meeting on a conversation about sexual harassment.
Report problems.
Jesse C. Shanahan, a graduate student in an astronomy master’s program at Wesleyan University, brought a Title IX complaint against a male graduate student whom she accused of sexual harassment. He had belittled her abilities as a female scientist, she says, sent her sexually explicit poems, and started unwelcome discussions with her about sex. Wesleyan found the student responsible for harassment but let him continue his studies if he underwent training.
—Robin Wilson
A few weeks later the dean called her back to his office and told her MIT was giving her a salary supplement that would last until her youngest child was 16. It meant that Ms. Seager, whose children were 6 and 8 at the time, could hire a housekeeper for two hours a day to prepare food and clean the house. She also hired a babysitter to pick up her children from school and stay some evenings. And she invited a family friend to live in the house in exchange for helping with the children’s morning routine and being in charge overnight when Ms. Seager needed to travel.
The crazy-quilt of helpers let Ms. Seager focus on her job as a professor of planetary science and physics when she needed to, and has left her grateful to MIT. It is one of few places where, she says, she isn’t treated differently because she’s female. “I don’t think about my gender while I’m here.”
That hasn’t always been the case for women at MIT. Sixteen years ago, the university was in the national spotlight for its mistreatment of female scientists. Nancy Hopkins, a professor of biology, literally got down on her hands and knees and measured office and lab space, finding that women got short shrift. Administrators acknowledged that the institution had discriminated against female scientists: Men not only earned more money than women but had bigger offices, were given better committee assignments, and were granted more departmental awards and distinctions. In response, the university hired more female scientists, increased the pay of female professors who were already there by more than the average faculty raise, asked more women to lead search committees, and approved their requests for more lab space.
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When Ms. Seager goes to other campuses, though, she says she is often treated with condescension because she is a woman. For example, she’ll arrive to give a talk and when she asks where to find the professor who invited her, some male academic will say, “in a snotty voice,” ‘Oh, do you have an appointment?’ " Ms. Seager is a MacArthur Fellow, an honor that comes with a $625,000 grant for individuals who are considered to have shown exceptional creativity and the promise to do more good work. But that doesn’t matter, she says. Because she’s a woman, some people assume that she isn’t accomplished, she says, and treat her accordingly.
What’s more, female scientists undercut themselves, Ms. Seager says. She’s watched women in astronomy decide not to press for first authorship on an article and be less confident in campus job interviews than their male counterparts are. A female job candidate might hesitate before answering a question, or answer “I don’t really know” and then give a great response. Women are also more likely than men to point out the least interesting part of their work rather than the most, she says.
“Men are more aggressive,” she says, “and a lot of women’s natural tendency is to take a step back.”
Ms. Seager realized as a postdoc that she was sabotaging her career by being so helpful to other scientists, something she views as another dangerous tendency of female academics. “I used to run models of exoplanet atmospheres to help other people make predictions because they would ask me to run them,” she says. “But then I realized, if you are constantly running models to help someone else, you can’t get your own stuff done.”
This year Ms. Seager was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. In 2012 she was named one of Time magazine’s “25 Most Influential People in Space.” She is in the same field — the study of exoplanets — as Geoffrey W. Marcy, the Berkeley astronomer who resigned last month following the university’s determination that he was responsible for sexually harassing female undergraduates.
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‘A lot of women’s natural tendency is to take a step back.’
Ms. Seager began her study of exoplanets in 1996, six months after the discovery of the first exoplanet, 51 Pegasi b, orbiting a sunlike star. She had been searching for a Ph.D. topic at Harvard University when her dissertation adviser suggested that she work on those new planets.
She has collaborated with Mr. Marcy and has considered him a friend. She says she didn’t know about the harassment charges and doesn’t want to talk about him or what he is accused of doing.
Ms. Seager remarried this year. Her new husband, a retired businessman and amateur astronomer, helps take care of the children. She has scaled back to just one babysitter.
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Emily Levesque: It’s Been Pleasant to Not Have to Worry About Gender
When news broke this semester that a famous astronomer had been found responsible for sexually harassing undergraduate women, Emily M. Levesque put aside the regular agenda of a graduate-student club she advises at the University of Washington to focus its next meeting on a discussion of sexual harassment.
“Almost the entire department ended up coming,” she says. “We talked about what resources are available here if someone were to have a similar problem. Do you go to your adviser, to your department head, to the ombudsperson?” The answer, she says, could be any of those, depending on the circumstances. “We were laying out what mechanisms are available to students.”
The face of astronomy at the University of Washington is different than at most institutions. Nearly half of the 31 graduate students in astronomy are women, and by next year, so will be almost half — six of 13 — of the tenured and tenure-track faculty members. Nationwide, only about 20 percent of graduate students in physics and astronomy and 16 percent of professors in those departments are women.
The number of female astronomers at Washington jumped last year, when the department hired three assistant professors, all of them women. Ms. Levesque, who had spent five years as a postdoc at the University of Colorado at Boulder, was one of them.
Scott F. Anderson, chairman of the department, says Washington didn’t set out to hire only women; the short list for the jobs included four women and five men. It just turned out, he says, that the top candidates were all female.
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The results have been good for the department’s culture, he says. “Having a gender balance makes this feel to women like a place where they aren’t on the outside.”
Ms. Levesque didn’t go to Washington because of the women who were already there or because of the large cohort hired last year. “I wasn’t doing the math saying, I’m going to the place that has the most women,” she says. “I’ve been in plenty of situations where I was the only woman, and the climate has been perfectly good.”
‘I’m a woman but consider myself a scientist first.’
What set Washington apart from other places she could have worked was a dynamic that is probably related to the department’s gender balance, she says. “What I’ve seen so far is this is an extremely supportive department,” one where faculty members get along. “There are lots of people doing research with each other.”
During the departmental discussion of sex harassment last month, Ms. Levesque didn’t have any personal stories to tell about problems she has faced. “There is a tendency to expect women to be experts on these topics,” she says. “But look, this hasn’t happened to me. It’s been pleasant to not have to worry about gender. It has left me free to do the work.”
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That work started off in 2004 when, as an undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology doing summer research at Lowell Observatory on the temperature of stars, Ms. Levesque discovered the three largest known stars. They are 1,500 times the size of the sun and have 25 times the mass. She was just a junior when she presented a research paper on her findings — of which she was first author — at an American Astronomical Society meeting. “This was a wonderful introduction to astronomy,” she says, “and kept me interested and pushed me to keep doing it as a career.”
Ms. Levesque won the Annie Jump Cannon Award last year, given annually by the astronomical society to a female astronomer within five years of earning her Ph.D. who has done outstanding research and shows promise to do more.
Last month she attended her first meeting of Washington’s chapter of the Association for Women Astronomers. Most of the meetings are potluck at someone’s home. This time, because sexual discrimination and harassment had been in the news, some of the roughly 20 women who attended told stories about their experiences. But then the conversation got into astronomy: the mechanics of building telescopes, research conducted on trips to observatories, even the latest Star Wars movie.
“I’m a woman but consider myself a scientist first,” says Ms. Levesque. “What I liked was that it meant equally as much sense to talk about something geeky, like a Star Wars movie, as it did to talk about gender in science.”
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Jedidah Isler: It’s More Than Doing Science. It’s Making Inroads for Students Like Me.
There are fewer than 100 black women with doctorates in physics and astronomy, and Jedidah Isler is one of them.
When she earned a Ph.D. in astronomy from Yale University last year she became the first black woman there to do so. Now, as a postdoctoral fellow in Vanderbilt University’s astronomy group, she is one of 17 women and six black scholars among the group’s 36 graduate students, postdocs, and faculty members.
In a field in which the overwhelming majority of professors are white and male, Ms. Isler’s gender and race have made her feel like an outlier but also that she is part of a special community within astronomy.
“Our numbers are so small,” she says. “We don’t all know each other, but we often can get to one another if we need to. It creates a sense of camaraderie.”
As part of the small minority community within academic astronomy, Ms. Isler has experienced racism. There was the time she was at a national astronomy meeting and a fellow scientist asked her what was on the menu. The man had assumed she was a food server. It wasn’t the first time something like that had happened.
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“They are doing this because of a predisposed stereotype about what black women should be doing in that space,” she says. “I just point out that I’m Dr. Isler, an astrophysicist, so you’ll have to ask someone who works here about the food.” But the implication hurts. “It is as if I don’t belong there, and my job is not to be part of the intellectual conversation; it’s to serve other people.”
‘It’s up to you to create something you want to do.’
She recalls a faculty meeting where a professor remarked that any student of color who entered the field could be expected to be academically weak. The worst part, recalls Ms. Isler, is that no one else pointed out that the comment was inappropriate. “This kind of thing happens all the time,” she says. “It makes the environment toxic for me.”
There are “serial racists” in astronomy, she says, just as there are serial sexual harassers. She doesn’t believe that they will ever be disciplined by their universities. “Some professors say outwardly racist things, some differentiate in the way they grade, in what their expectations are, and in who they give help to,” she says. “I have mentioned troubling encounters before to people in authority who would have the ability to do something. But I’ve been told I’m making it up, being too sensitive, and that the person doesn’t do things like that.”
Ms. Isler is pleased that in sexual-harassment cases like the astronomer Geoffrey W. Marcy’s, universities are beginning to address sexual harassment. But “a part of me still aches for having to protect young people coming up behind me from racial discrimination.”
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She got her start at Norfolk State University, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in physics. She’d known she wanted to be an astrophysicist since she was about 12. “I always had quite a bit of energy,” she says. “I would play outside in the grass for hours looking up at the sky and trying to figure out what was happening.”
After earning her degree, Ms. Isler stepped out of academe for awhile for family reasons. Two years later she started thinking about how to get back into astronomy. She knew she needed to retool, so she attended the Fisk-Vanderbilt Master’s-to-Ph.D. Bridge Program, which seeks to expand access for minority students to advanced-degree programs in science, math, and engineering.
“The program here capitalizes on the well-known fact that students of color generally are more likely to go to an institution whose highest degree is a master’s degree, while white students go directly on to a Ph.D.,” she says. The program helped raise her confidence and prepared her to take the Graduate Record Exam in physics. “It taught me: How does one become a graduate student? These are all pieces of the puzzle you don’t know.”
For example, Ms. Isler says, she got advice on how to pick an adviser whose interests mesh with her own. And on how to write an academic paper and pitch a project that she could work on with others. “It’s up to you to create something you want to do,” she says. “These are all skills you don’t walk into graduate school knowing how to do.”
Ms. Isler received a three-year, $300,000 postdoctoral fellowship in astronomy and astrophysics from the National Science Foundation. She studies jets, or emissions, that are formed near supermassive black holes.
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“Jedidah is a force of nature,” says Kelly Holley-Bockelmann, an associate professor of astrophysics at Vanderbilt. “When you meet her, you can tell that she is going to make a big impact on our field. She is already leading a large research group on blazars, advising senior faculty, postdocs, graduate students, and undergrads from different institutions. Running a research group is unheard of at such a junior stage in her career.”
At Vanderbilt, Ms. Isler serves as a mentor to women and minority students who study astrophysics. Sometimes, she says, students question whether they belong after experiences or encounters that make them feel like outsiders.
“We talk about, Do they want to address a situation that could be racist or sexist, or do they not?” says Ms. Isler. “They are often balancing their love for science versus the advocacy that they often want to partake in on behalf of others.”
She helps students weigh the pros and cons of speaking up about discrimination: “How do you determine when is the right time to do that, versus the disadvantage of the repercussions you might encounter?”
Ms. Isler has started a monthly Google hangout called Vanguard: Conversations With Women of Color in STEM — which hosts national online conversations for women of color in science and math. So far the group has had five online shows. During one, three minority women with doctorates in science talked about how they fell in love with their field, people who encouraged them along the way, and the most discouraging thing they had ever heard and how they dealt with it.
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“For me, it’s more than doing my science,” says Ms. Isler. “It’s trying to continuously make inroads for students of color coming up after me.”
Jesse Shanahan: Do I Want to Spend My Career Wading Through a Hostile Environment?
It wasn’t until her last semester as an undergraduate that Jesse C. Shanahan took her first course in astrobiology. She had been reluctant to enroll in basic science classes at the University of Virginia because the large size of those classes intimidated her.
After just a few weeks in astrobiology, Ms. Shanahan realized that she wanted to change her major from North African linguistics to astronomy. It was too late if she still wanted to graduate that spring. So she looked for a different path.
When she presented her senior thesis at a linguistics conference that January, at Rice University, she wandered over to the department of physics and astronomy to ask advice. How could she get into the field after only a single course in the discipline? “I walked through the department and just laid this tangled mess at their feet and said, ‘What do I do?’ " she recalls.
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A Rice professor happened to know a scholar at George Mason University, back in Ms. Shanahan’s home state, Virginia, and suggested that she follow up to see if she could take courses and work with the professor on his research.
She ended up spending a year and a half after graduating from Virginia, in 2013, auditing undergraduate physics and astronomy courses at George Mason and contributing to a research program there. She also traveled to an observatory in Puerto Rico with a George Mason professor on a weeklong research project studying gas in galaxies.
She took a course in astrobiology, and it changed her life.
Ms. Shanahan knew that her astronomy background was unconventional enough that she’d have trouble gaining admission to a Ph.D. program. So she tried the master’s program in astronomy at Wesleyan University, which admits only two students a year and is aimed at preparing nontraditional students for doctoral study.
“She was about as nontraditional as we’ve ever gotten,” says Edward C. Moran, chairman of the astronomy department at Wesleyan. “She displayed tremendous enthusiasm and passion.”
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While at Wesleyan, Ms. Shanahan, now in her second year there, has helped form the American Astronomical Society’s first working group on disability and accessibility in astronomy. She has a condition known as Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, a connective-tissue disorder that hinders her mobility, causing her to often use a cane. Because of the disorder, she will take three years rather than two to complete her master’s degree.
Ms. Shanahan says she has confronted sex discrimination and harassment since entering her new field. Last year she brought a Title IX complaint against a male graduate student whom she accused of sexual harassment. He belittled her abilities as a female scientist, she says, sent her sexually explicit poems, and started unwelcome discussions with her about sex.
Wesleyan found the student responsible for harassment but determined that he could remain at the university if he underwent training in how to avoid such behavior in the future. The student has taken a leave from the university, Wesleyan said.
Ms. Shanahan isn’t sure if she’ll pursue a Ph.D. or embark on a career educating the general public about astronomy. She likes helping children develop a love of astronomy, having started bimonthly “Kids’ Nights” at Wesleyan’s Van Vleck Observatory. She gives the elementary-school students a short presentation on some aspect of astronomy at each meeting and then leads them in experiments. The students have made model comets and have dug into boxes of dirt filled with mineral samples, to decide whether each mineral is something that might be found in a meteorite.
“I’ve seen numerous accounts by professors and postdocs of the kind of sexual harassment I’ve experienced,” says Ms. Shanahan.
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“The thought of having to go through six more years of this environment in a Ph.D. program is part of why I’m very torn about it. And then, do I want to spend the rest of my career wading through a hostile environment?”
Robin Wilson writes about campus culture, including sexual assault and sexual harassment. Contact her at robin.wilson@chronicle.com.
Robin Wilson began working for The Chronicle in 1985, writing widely about faculty members’ personal and professional lives, as well as about issues involving students. She also covered Washington politics, edited the Students section, and served as news editor.