Yet another post for Astrobites!
This one is another interview of a keynote speaker at the upcoming American Astronomical Society meeting in Denver, CO. I got to talk to Keivan Stassun about his work studying exoplanets and about his inspiring work on neurodiversity. He was such a fun person to talk to, and I hope you'll check out the post!
Another day, another new post over on Astrobites!
This was a different kind of piece than I’ve ever done before. Most things I’ve written have been summaries – of a conference, of a paper, of something I read. But this time, I got to interview the inspiring Debra Fischer, who is trying to find new Earth-like planets around other stars. I had so much fun talking to her!
Not only is she a successful #womaninSTEM, but her story is simply inspiring. Go take a read!
I wrote a new post over on Astrobites that went live today!
As a woman in STEM, this one hits home. The paper I wrote about today took data from ten recent Canadian telescope proposal cycles. Essentially, if you want to use a telescope, you have to make your case and convince the Time Allocation Committee (TAC) that they should give you time over someone else. The authors of the paper I wrote about found large disparities in the number of successful proposals for men vs. women. They even further broke the data into faculty vs. non-faculty, senior vs. non-senior people in astronomy, and several other categories. They generally found the same trends no matter how they sliced the data.
One important thing to note is that the TACs in this sample had full access to the names of the proposers. That is, they knew when evaluating the proposals whether they were led by men or women! The authors of the paper noted that the gender makeup of the TAC didn’t seem to have any effect on the gender ratio of successful proposals, bringing up the interesting concept of implicit social cognition. In other words, even women subconsciously rate women lower, even if they did equal work to a man!
A solution to this problem is to double-blind the entire review process – the reviewers don’t know who wrote the proposal they’re evaluating, and the proposers don’t know who reviewed their proposal. This technique has been proven to improve the gender ratio in a variety of other settings. Thankfully, the Canadian TACs from this paper recently adopted the double-blinded review process, so I hope we’ll soon see the gender gap narrow!
My new post for Astrobites is now live!
This one was fun to write, partly because the naming of this phenomenon is one of my favorite stories. If you’ve ever seen the 2006 movie “Over the Hedge” you might remember the scene where the animals first encounter the big, scary hedge. To make it less scary, they name it Steve. Now fast-forward to 2016, when some amateur astronomers in northern Canada spotted a new, unknown type of aurora. For lack of a better name, they called it “Steve” in the spirit of the 2006 movie.
Now, STEVE stands for Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement. That’s a lot of words that probably don’t mean much, but over the past two years we’ve come to realize that STEVE isn’t actually a typical aurora. Instead, it’s something called a “subauroral ion drift”, or SAID. SAIDs are usually produced during auroral storms, but instead of arising from interactions of the solar wind with Earth’s magnetic field, they are short-lived events produced by supersonic flows of ions and plasma in the atmosphere.
STEVE is really cool, and also has a pretty cool name. Go read the post and let me know what you think!
STEVE, a long and skinny purple ribbon in the sky, usually southward of the main aurora. Credit: Elfie Hall
I wrote a new post for Astrobites that went live today!
This post covers a topic that I’ve struggled a lot with and that is very common among graduate students: imposter syndrome. That voice in your head telling you you’re not good enough, not qualified, just “faking it” through everything. This post was inspired by Valerie Young’s book “The Secret Thoughts of Successful Women.”. In it, I summarize some of the ways imposter syndrome can manifest and what you can do to start tackling that inner voice.
Do you suffer from imposter syndrome? Let’s all spread some anti-imposter love in the comments.
ABOUT RESOURCES COLLABORATE QUICK LINKS
Copyright © 2022 Stephanie JH Deppe, PhD
