May 1, 2021 • 48 mins
Today's lady astronomers are following a trail that was blazed by brilliant women centuries ago, but it hasn't always been easy-going. Cristen and Caroline examine the state of this fascinating STEM field and the women who are helping to map the sky in this classic episode.
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, this is Annie, Samantha. I love for Stephane never
told your production of iHeart Radio. So, Samantha, when I
told you we were doing these classic episodes on women
in space, you immediately started singing Rocket Rocket Man by
(00:29):
Elison John. Obviously, I and you immediately went to space Jam.
Apparently space Jam, Yeah, because one time I went to
a nineties party and I had met on my space
jam Jersey, which I know has made an appearance on
our Instagram, and somebody requested that song and it but
I didn't sing it or anything, but I like gotten
(00:49):
the center and people freaked out. It was the best
because they love you. They're very excited about space Jam
or one of the other. But I guess for space songs,
I think of ground Controlled the major Tom probably first.
But I wanted to ask you how about the Armageddon song? Oh?
(01:12):
You know, I was thinking about that the other day
because when our class when I was in sixth grade,
we went on a field ship to space Camp. It's
just a very formative experience for me in a lot
of ways. And on the bus, our teacher put on
Armageddon forgetting that there is a strip club scene and
(01:33):
also that kind of weird animal Cracker. Yeah, we've ben
Affleck And what's your Tyler lived? I lived Tyler. I
was gonna say Liz, and I'm like, it's not Liz
and she turned it off and we all were like no,
and she put on Flubber instead and we were like,
(01:54):
this is not all that I was gonna ask. Is
ee mainly a non stick order? Probably? But do you
have any like horror movie are kind of like a
movie you know that isn't really that great, but for
some reason, you catch yourself wanting to watch it a lot,
watch it a lot. Well, you would accuse me of
(02:16):
doing that with The Mummy too, I feel like, which
was a whole thing. I don't know if I would
say I don't love it, just like it just become
a habit that I've watched a lot of Star Wars
a lot and all of the subsequent series that goes
(02:36):
with it, and now I'm getting a lot of updates
with that as well. So do those count? Yeah? Sure,
I guess I have like a roster of horror movies
that I would say are not They're not necessarily bad,
but they're not good. But for some reason, I just
I'm like, you know what. I want to watch that
that movie again. One of them is this movie called Coherence,
(02:58):
which I watched last night actually, but it's about like
a comet coming close to the earth and then it
messes up like all these alternate realities, and there's this
whole plot point of you're trying to mark your house
so you know that you're at the right reality, and
(03:19):
so you like random numbers and pictures and items in
a box. And I was telling a friend of mine
about this, and she said something about we need to
come up with us saying, and she's, Malla is where
the money is. And she was talking about the holiday
special and she's she said, no one in any reality
(03:42):
has ever uttered that scenence. For It's like, I think,
you're right, We've created a beacon. This is a reality.
I know now it's gonna spread. You're right, I gotta
come up with something else. I'm going to keep it
to myself. It's true, you know what, though, And the
another one that I have not necessarily just continue to watch,
(04:03):
but it's new and it's about a new planet is
raised by wolves, which our friend Holly Fried has done
a podcast in conjunction with that. HBO Max show, which
have you watched this at all? Should? I? Well, let
me just give you a preference. Likes. There's a war,
there's androids, and they go to a new planet and
they're trying to save humanity, and it is an interesting
(04:26):
movie about what it would look like to settle on
a new planet, which I feel like that's what we're
trying to do with Mars. Right. Oh yeah, you weren't
working for us at this point, Smantha. But a couple
of years back, our boss at the time send out
this article about how we were all going to be
on Mars. It was it was a really good article. Um,
I have my doubts, but I do enjoy a space
(04:52):
thriller harm movie sci fi usually scare me pretty good,
which I like. But anyway, all that being said, yes,
there has been a lot of space news, so we
thought we would bringing back these classics on women and stargazing,
So please enjoy. Welcome to Stuff Mom Never told You
(05:13):
from House Supports dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Kristin and I'm Caroline, and welcome to part two
of our Stargazing Women's series about women in astronomy and
before we dive in Caroline. I had a moment of
(05:35):
astronomical synchronicity happen in the car yesterday. Can I tell
you about it? Because I got so excited because we
were doing this podcast today. So I'm listening to NPR
per usual, and an announcement comes on talking about this
comment called the love Joy comment that was passing over Atlanta,
(05:56):
where Caroline and I are located. And I got really excited,
not so much about the comment, but because they interviewed
a woman astronomer at our local fern Bank Observatory all
about this comment, and I was like, oh, this is
a woman. She the podcast has come alive. It's a
(06:20):
woman astronomer. They exist, and she's so excited about the
stars and here this whole time, I thought when the
podcast came alive, it would be on Ice. No, not,
that's later. Okay, that's a that's one. That's a project
still in the works. You and I have to get
our our ice dancing. Yes, yes, um, but yeah, I
(06:41):
really nerded out in my car by myself. There was
no one to tell, so I just kind of yelped aloud.
Yes I was doing the same thing, but in my
bathroom getting ready to come to Wark. You heard the
same announcement I did. It's like it's as if we
both listened to NPR. Yeah, it's like we're both total
nerds who knew um. When we left off in part one,
(07:04):
we had gotten up into this factory system of astronomical observations.
Women like Maria Mitchell were starting to make inroads in
terms of women and astronomy. You had observatory set up
at some women's colleges like Vasser, but we were still
kind of pushed off to this side in a lot
(07:25):
of ways. Right. A lot of the women who were
in astronomy in this era were definitely in the more
clerical positions. And it wasn't because hey, women are so smart,
we love women. Put them in the clerical positions so
they'll they'll make amazing discoveries. The popular opinion was more like,
we don't trust women to use their delicate lady brains,
so let's put them in these clerical positions so they
(07:47):
can pour over astro photography data for hours on end.
But the great thing is that even in these positions
of you know, supposed lesser power or lesser ability, they
still managed to make pretty amazing discoveries. And one of
the biggest names in this whole factory like setting of
astronomy was Charles Pickering at the Harvard Observatory. So, thanks
(08:12):
to photographic technology that was developing at the time, they
were able to see more than ever before. But they
needed to analyze all of these snapshots of the sky
that they were getting and it was very, very tedious work. Yeah,
and so Pickering had this guy as his assistant and
I don't know what the guy was doing. I don't
(08:32):
know if he's fallen asleep on the job, but either way,
he's just letting Pickering down. And so Pickering was like,
screw you, dude, you're not doing your job. I need
somebody who's actually competent. And who did he consider to
be competent around him? Well, that would be Willemina Fleming,
his maid. She's a single mother who Pickering brings on
(08:53):
as his astronomy assistant because he's like, I know you,
you hang out around me a lot, and you're pretty competent.
And so he passes along all of this astrophotography analysis
to Fleming, who ends up working at Harvard for more
than thirty four years thanks to her skill at computing
and copying, and she was the first woman to have
(09:13):
a formal appointment there. And during Pickering's time at Harvard,
which lasted from eighteen seventy seven to nineteen nineteen, more
than eighty women worked for him and mostly clerical capacities,
doing computing and cataloging work, and they are referred to
often as Pickering's women, or alternatively as Pickering's harem. Yeah,
(09:36):
that's just great, that's so great. Yeah, lots of lots
of respect, so much respect. But they were doing important
work despite the stupid name. They provided data that ended
up forming the empirical basis for larger astronomical theory. But
of course they were earning just twenty five to fifty
cents an hour, half of what a man would have
(09:58):
been paid in the same position. Yeah, and the Hard
Observatory is an interesting case study in how women contributed
more data, particularly on variable stars which your stars that
change in brightness, than their counterparts did. And it's largely
due to this system that they had set up of
(10:19):
all working together and sharing information and collaborating. And I've
got to give a shout out now to Cosmos, the
show hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson, which in the episode
Sisters of the Sun, he takes the time to focus
on the women in the Harvard Observatory who were laying
(10:40):
the foundation for all of these incredible astronomical discoveries to come,
because without Pickering's women, we would know so much less
about the stars in the sky. Absolutely, and Doritt Hofflett
from Yale University, who herself was a giant name in
astronomy about variable stars in particular, and she talked about
(11:02):
how from the eighteen eighties, so Pickering's time to the
nineteen fifties, women contributed way more data on these types
of stars. Variable stars are the kind that change brightness
than their male counterparts did. By nineteen fifty nine, in fact,
women including will Amina Fleming, had discovered more than seventy
of the more than fourteen thousand named variable stars then know,
(11:25):
But we should back up first for a minute. Yeah,
we need to hop back to eight nine six when
a woman named Annie jump Cannon transfers from Wellesley, where
she helped conduct experiments on X rays, to Radcliffe College
in order to make her way into Pickering's observatory. And
(11:45):
what she did was simplify Pickering and will Amina Fleming's
system for classifying stars and the work that Canon does.
The simplest way to explain it is that she, I mean,
she almost set up like a Dewey decimal system for
the stars. She figured out how to categorize and label
(12:06):
all of them. I mean, then this is still a
system that we used today, right, And in nine two,
this this definitely did not go unnoticed because in nineteen
two the International Astronomical Union ended up adopting her method
of categorizing stars, which was based on their temperatures, as
the official classification system. So that's no small potatoes, and
(12:26):
she received a whole lot of accolades going forward. In
five she was the first woman to be awarded an
honorary doctorate from the University of Oxford, and in nineteen
thirty three, after becoming the first woman officer in the
American Astronomical Society, she established their Annie Jump Canon Award,
which is given to a North American female astronomer four
(12:47):
distinguished contributions to the field. And we will have more
to say about that award and how it changed later
in this nineteen seventies. But in nineteen thirty eight Harvard
appointed Canon the William C. Bond, Professor of astra Enemy.
So she is definitely one of the huge names in astronomy,
specifically as someone who came out of Fleming's you know,
(13:10):
group of women. I won't say Harem, I just said harem. Yeah,
we need a better name rather than I don't even
like pickerings women. Does that even sound so possessive? So
maybe we should rename them, I mean Sisters of the Sun,
which is what Neil deGrasse Tyson called them, or whoever
wrote his scripts. I thought was pretty good. And at
the end of that episode side note Caroline, he's drinking
(13:32):
some wine with this older woman. I think he's in
Italy or something, and he looks into the camera and
raises his wine glass and toast the Sisters of the Sun,
and it says that's well he should. It's an amazing moment.
But anyway, there's another woman that we need to mention.
He was working alongside Annie jump Cannon at this time.
(13:53):
She actually joined the Harvard Observatory in just a year
prior to Annie jump Cannon. And this is Henrietta Swan Levitt.
And what she did was figure out a way to
measure the distance of stars really really really far away.
It's something called the Seafia variable period luminosity relationship. Of course, yeah,
(14:18):
I mean which obviously um so it's often referred to
as the distance key. And this made possible all subsequent
discoveries in astronomy of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries because
they could finally get dimensions to these farther away kinds
of stars. So not only do we have Cannon who
(14:39):
is labeling and categorizing all these stars, now we have
Levet coming along to offer some distance in there. And
then when we get to we have Cecilia Payne, who
then offers us this breakthrough information on the composition of
the stars. Right. And so what's interesting about Cecilia Paine
(15:02):
is that, you know, she makes these amazing contributions, but
there's a little bit of self doubt in there. But
first let's establish why she's so awesome. Cecilia Paine is
the first person to receive a PhD from the Harvard
Astronomy Department, and her thesis rocks the astrophysics world because
she demonstrated that the Sun was made almost exclusively from
hydrogen and helium, thus its makeup was way different from
(15:26):
the Earth because leading up to the scientists had thought
that the Earth and the Sun were basically composed similarly.
But you know, Kristen, you and I have talked about
the imposter syndrome on the podcast before. To protect her reputation,
Paine inserted a clause at the beginning of her thesis
stating that the results were quote probably not real. Just
(15:47):
in case somebody laughed at her or said this is ridiculous.
She was like, oh, hey, I'm just gonna put this
here about what the Sun is made of. But who knows,
maybe it's wrong. Well, I mean she had already gotten
flat from professors. I forget, there's a specific guy at
Harvard who had looked at her work and was really
skeptical just because it was such a revolutionary idea. And
(16:11):
imagine too that your Cecilia Paine, and she came to
the United States from Britain specifically because in Britain at
the time, she couldn't go to college, she couldn't study
alongside men. So I mean, imposter syndrome on top of
impost syndrome for this woman who is studying theoretical and
(16:31):
anatomical physics and blowing people's minds at a time when
in the place that she's from she wasn't even allowed
to go to school, right, And her work ended up
laying the foundation for our understanding of stars compositions in general,
not just the sun, and a Guardian article referred to
it as the astrophysical equivalent of Darwin's origin of the species,
(16:53):
so clearly laying some amazing groundwork for astronomy. So did
a similar pattern of allowing or women into the fold
happened during World War Two for women in astronomy as well. Yeah,
I mean it definitely did. World War two shook up society,
as we know and have talked about many times on
the podcast. STEM jobs were definitely no exception because as
(17:15):
we've seen from the last episode on Astronomy and as
we're talking about now, educational and professional opportunities were definitely
expanding as more women's colleges were opening their doors to
researchers and helping women get a foot in the door.
Um not to mention the the social change as far
as ideas about women not being physically or mentally fit
(17:37):
to work outside the home or in scientific fields were
starting to fall away, and the notion about married women
needing to stay home was also falling away. Of course
it's not totally though, because that's still kind of as around.
But during the war, during World War Two, there were
fewer male grad students around, and so there was a
relative increase in the number of female astronomers in the
(18:00):
nineteen In particular in the United States, the National Science
Foundation estimated that bachelor's degrees in physics reached a high
of up from fourteen percent in nineteen forty. And the
reason that we're pointing out physics and in particulars that
most astronomy grad students do have a physics degree. And
(18:20):
thanks to the technological research happening during World War One
that's fueled by military pursuits, astronomy is still an evolving
field because you get the emergence of radio astronomy, which
happened during the war thanks to radar research, and so
you have this combinations of new fields and branches within
the field and also fewer men. So in Australia, Ruby
(18:45):
Payne Scott became one of the first radio astronomers and
was the first woman radio astronomer, and she was also
an author on numerous early papers and became a scientific
leader until after the war, right, Yeah, when the men
start coming home from the war and women's overall numbers
not only in the workforce in general, but also in
(19:07):
astronomy and other stem fields. When men's numbers increase, in
women's numbers decrease. After the war, pain Scott still managed
to make huge contributions to the understanding of solar radio
bursts and the development of radio astronomical techniques and instruments.
So that's great, right, Like she managed to hold on
(19:29):
when so many women were shoved out of the workforce
when men came home. It didn't last long because even
though I literally just mentioned a second ago that the
idea that women needed to stay home and be wives
and mothers and oh you better not higher wives and mothers,
because women in the workforce are obviously like aberrations of
the norm. Ruby pain Scott was doing great. She had
(19:53):
to hide the fact though, that she was getting married,
and when she got pregnant she ended up having to
resign from the field. And of course this follows the
fact that she was also suspected of being a comy
and was definitely an outspoken feminist about getting other women
involved in astronomy and stem fields, and so people were like, wait,
so you're a comi feminist, outspoken scientific lady and now
(20:18):
you're getting married and having a child. Get out of here.
The world was not ready for Ruby Payne Scott. Now
it sounds like well, and when it comes so to
that whole marriage factor, this is a pattern that you're
gonna see throughout the next few decades in terms of
UM observatories and research facilities having these anti nepotism rules,
(20:42):
which essentially meant that if your husband is working in
a lab, then his your the wife is not going
to be allowed to work in the lab because that's
what they considered nepotism, which actually hampered a lot of
women's careers because I mean, it makes sense that you know,
you're an astrophysicist, you meet another astroid physicist, you fall
(21:04):
in love. You know, stars in your eyes literally the
stars aligned. So there, you know, that's that's that's sort
of a downer of a rule for a number of
these astronomers astronomers working. But of course, when it comes
to this anti nepotism rule, it's the wife who has
to go home, not the husband typically, which leads us
(21:26):
to second wave feminism. Yes, according to the National Science Foundation.
Though from nineteen fifty to nineteen seventy the proportion of
women earning bachelor's degrees in physics states still at about
four to six percent, So not a ton of women
studying physics. Yeah, but when you move into the sixties
and seventies, the numbers start to increase. In nineteen seventy two,
(21:49):
for instance, if we're talking about bachelor's degrees, women earned
seventeen percent of bachelor's degrees in astronomy. And during that
period of the sixties to the seventies, while the nomber
of female PhDs rose, the percentage of women in the
American Astronomical Society, for instance, dropped to just eight percent
by nineteen seventy three. So the numbers are sort of
(22:10):
all over the place. And during this time the job
prospects are still terrible for married women. There was a
lot of fear about women taking time off to have children.
Oh yeah, the workplace issues for working moms. In astronomy
echoes so many of the workplace issues we still hear
about today for working moms, that whole sneering at part
(22:31):
time work of trying to balance family and this really
intensive research because understandably astronomy is like say, being a
lawyer is a field that requires and you're expected to
pour so many hours. It's not a forty hour week
kind of gig. And with that, there are still echoes
(22:53):
of the Pickering's women or Pickering's harem era going on. Um,
which leads us to the story Joscelyn Bell Burnell who
discovered pull stars. F y. I pull stars are remnants
of massive stars after they've exploded. And I think that
before Burnell figured that out, we thought that they were aliens. Really, yeah,
(23:16):
the little green men. Really yep, I had no idea.
I'm learning so much from you, Kristen. Well, I'm just
I just learned a lot from Dale Grass Tyson. So well,
there we go. Um, and this is coming from National Geographic.
But in nineteen sixty seven, Burnell, as you said, discovered
pulsars while she was in grad school four radio astronomy.
Hey Ruby Paine Scott at Cambridge in England. And Burnell
(23:42):
was just, you know, no big deal, studying three miles
worth of paper from a radio telescope that she helped
build when she made this discovery, and hooray it resulted
in a Nobel Prize that's wonderful, right, Yeah, but the
Nobel Prize went to her male supervised there and another
male astronomer. Yeah. So Burnell, the way that she explains
(24:05):
it is the picture people had at the time of
the way that science was done was that there was
a senior man, and it was always a man who
had under him a whole load of minions, junior staff
who weren't expected to think, who were only expected to
do as he said. So, how did I mean that
sounds exactly like pickerings women. Yeah. And I heard an
interview with Burrell on the BBC not that long ago,
(24:29):
and they played a clip of the male supervisor who
had received the Nobel Prize, and he stood by it.
He essentially said, well, you just have to understand that
there's a difference between the captain of the ship and
the crew. So when you know, if there's a successful voyage,
who's really to think? And so, I mean, this guy
(24:50):
clearly fancies himself a captain of of a pleasure group.
Do you think he wears like a jaunty captain? Sat? Yes,
I knew. And Belle Burnell, when she was asked by
the bb SEE reporter for her response to that she
was essentially like, that's where he stands. If I got
if I continued to get mad about this every day,
(25:11):
then I would not be able to do any work.
But she made so clear how challenging it was constantly
to be a woman in this field, even before the
whole balancing of family and career. When she first walked
into like an auditorium sized classroom in college, all of
(25:32):
the men in the room started stamping their feet and
whooping because that was just tradition, because she was, you know,
the only woman in the room, and so of course
she was going to get heckled. And so that's what
was happening when she was in graduate school. And then
she gets the Nobel Prize just snatched out from under her.
And a National Geographic points out that even though yes,
(25:56):
this woman discovered pool stars should have been given a
Nobel Prize, a cetera, many of the positions she was
offered in her career were focused on teaching or administrative
and management duties because that was still seen as more
women appropriate work. Yeah, and she does point out that
it was extremely hard combining family and career, which is
something that women today obviously still struggle with. Times have
(26:19):
not changed that much. But as of Burnell was a
visiting astronomy professor at the University of Oxford. She recently
chaired a working group for the Royal Society of Edinburgh
and she was tasked with finding a strategy to boost
the number of women in stem fields in Scotland. And
there was one more think here only that jumped out
to me. In that BBC interview we mentioned that the
(26:42):
impostor syndrome and Cecilia Paine's work in the nineteen twenties.
Bell Burnell specifically called out the impostor syndrome as well,
and as she even asked the report, she was like,
if you ever heard of this thing called the impostor syndrome. Yeah,
it's essentially been something I've had to fight every single
day of my career, that sense of oh, well, no,
(27:03):
I'm going to be found out at some point because
I surely I don't belong here. But obviously those feelings
of not belonging have nothing to do with her actual
intelligence and prowess, but the environment, the hostile environment she's
been working in now for decades. And then as we
moved through the nineteen seventies, there are a couple more
developments in the field of astronomy that had a lot
(27:26):
to do with women. Um in nineteen seventy one asked
her physicist Margaret Bourbage declined the Cannon Prize. Now we
mentioned the Cannon Prize earlier. It was supposed to go to,
you know, incredible female astronomers who've made great strides and
made great contributions to the field. But Bourbage said that
the prize was discriminatory because it was available only to women.
(27:47):
And the direct result of this was that the American
Astronomical Society established basically a Lady Committee that recommended the
prize become a research award for which women in early
stages of their career years could apply. The reasoning being
that women faced numerous disadvantages early on in their education,
(28:08):
uh in their grad school career and getting a career
going off the ground, and so yeah, basically the reasoning
was like, if we give it to women who are
still in school, then that's not as discriminatory. And so
in nineteen seventy two they recommended that the a S
set up a group to review the status of women
in astronomy, and in nineteen seventy three that new Committee,
the Working Group on the Status of Women in Astronomy
(28:30):
released a report where they found that the percent of
women in the a S was the lowest ever in
its history, that women were underrepresentative officers and other people
in this group, and that the United States was seventh,
and the percentage of female members of the International Astronomy Union.
So basically, basically, this group is like, hey, women aren't
(28:51):
in enough places in astronomy. Yeah. And as a result
of all this information that they're finding out, the data
that their collecting about women in the field, in ninety
Working Group on Women finally became a standing committee and
as a result of their work, members developed what was
(29:12):
called the Baltimore Charter, which had the goal of promoting
a culture that would help both men and women realize
their full potential in STEM careers. So the question that
is what is that full potential look like for astronomers today.
We'll talk about that when we come right back from
a quick break and now back to the show. So, Caroline,
(29:39):
what does being an astronomer entailed today? I mean, is
it have we learned everything there is to know about
the stars? I mean certainly not. You know, as we
mentioned in our first episode on women in Astronomy. Some
major discoveries were still being made in the nineteen nineties,
back when that Women's Committee was developing charter ys to
(30:00):
encourage people in the field of astronomy. We still have
so much to discover. But the field of astronomy itself
is relatively small, and this is coming from numbers from
the Bureau of Labor and Statistics. There are only about
six thousand professional astronomers in North America, and it's super
competitive because there are a hundred and fifty North American
(30:20):
job openings per year and there are one hundred and
twenty five pH d grads per year, so a lot
of people vying for not that many jobs. Yeah, and
if you do get a job, though, pays pretty well
to be an astronomer. In the median pay was one
hundred and six thousand dollars per year or per hour
(30:42):
if you're you know, wanted to keep track of it
that way. And the kinds of things obviously that you'd
be studying include planets, stars, galaxies, and other celestial bodies.
And there's all sorts of equipment that's involved as well,
including ground based equipment like radio and optical telescopes as
well as space based equipment such as the Hubble space telescope,
(31:02):
which a lot of listeners have probably heard of. And
you generally are either making observations are working on theory.
So what are some of the modern observations that astronomers
today have been making, Caroline, Well, it's not so much
that astronomers are looking through a telescope and sweeping the
(31:22):
sky as the ladies in our first episode did very often,
but rather use computers and super sophisticated telescopes that can
detect radiation other than visible lights, such as gamma rays
or radio waves, and rather than making direct observations by
sweeping the sky with a telescope, theoretical astronomers typically use
data from observational astronomers to develop theories. And we should
(31:47):
also mention too that telescope technology has also spawned numerous
medical applications, so there are day to day repercussions of
the work that astronomers are doing, and typically they're employed
at colleges, universities, and professional schools um they're also involved
in research and development in the physical, engineering, and life sciences,
(32:10):
and of course, if you are in aspiring astronomer or astrophysicists.
You can get a job with the federal government. You
can work for NASA or the Department of Defense. Right,
only of astronomers and astrophysicists end up in those cushy,
high paying federal government jobs like NASA. Most of them
(32:32):
are at colleges and stuff. But all right, so now
that we've laid out what astronomers are doing today, that
they're using big supercomputers, what does it look like out
there for ladies today in astronomy. Well, astronomy is usually
highlighted as a stem field that is friendlier to women,
which seems ironic considering you know, the Joscel and Bell
(32:55):
Burnell stories and the other ones that we've shared um.
But by and large it does tend to attract more
women than other stem fields, but it still suffers similar
leaky pipeline issues as we see all over stems. So
when it comes to the pipeline issue, it's usually the
same old tale of women starting out they're interested in physics,
(33:19):
are taking the courses and their bachelor's degrees, but they
don't make it to the PhD level. And then if
they make it a PhD level, there's a drop off
after that as well, right, And a lot of these
numbers though, can be deceiving. It really depends on what
phase of a woman's science career or astronomy career looking at.
Because we mentioned that uh, physics and physics bachelor's degrees
(33:44):
were important to talk about because typically that can lead
then to astronomy um And so when you look back
at middle school and high school, girls make up half
of physics students, but that number definitely drops way off
in high school and definitely in higher ed vucation. But
you also have to keep in mind that most high
(34:04):
school students or a lot of high school students have
to take things like physics or chemistry or whatever, and
so it's just important to keep in mind that, well, yes,
there is a pipeline issue. Sometimes you just have to
remember that certain things are inflating numbers and parts of
the pipeline. So if we look at higher education, and
(34:26):
this number is coming from two thousand three, so it's
a little bit dated, but women earn of physics bachelor's
degrees and forty percent of astronomy bachelor's degree. So you
see there about astronomy bachelor's degree. So hey, we're earning
almost half of them. Well done. Also, I can do
simple math um now. Now, when it comes to the
(34:49):
faculty and stand alone astronomy departments, women make up only
four percent of faculty members versus ten percent in physics departments,
so you might there too have shoes going on with
the whole visibility factor. You don't see many women at
the front of the classroom in physics and astronomy. Yeah,
but there is good news and bad news when it
(35:11):
comes to women teaching and higher education. Women are being
hired into the professorial ranks at better than their availability rate,
but the proportion of women in temporary faculty positions and
like assistant professor positions is even higher. So there's still
a little bit of echoes of pickerings women where well,
(35:31):
it's great that they're getting into this field, many of
them are still filling the lower positions. But M. I. T. S.
Claude cannas Are has found that women were tenured actually
at a slightly higher rate than men, and that the
clock stopping so to speak, to have or adopted child
actually did not affect women's likelihood of being tenured. That
(35:52):
is so surprised. That is so surprising because whenever it
comes to women in academia in general, it's usually that
whole tenure track of having to do not only teach,
but also do the research and get published, and just
all of the hours involved in that that requires to
get tenured is often cited as the you know, primary
reason for that that drop off in women UM. But
(36:15):
when it comes to some gender imparity in physics and astronomy,
the US is not alone in this. Most countries, in fact,
award less than a quarter of their first level university
physics degrees to women, and most grant less than of
their physics PhDs to women. But there is a PhD
that we need to mention. Astrophysicist Meg Garry, who has
(36:39):
been one leading the charge in terms of calling for
more recognition of issues affecting women in STEM how do
we close the leaky pipeline? Obviously providing visibility as a
female astrophysicist UM. She has echoed what knas Aris said
in terms of there's a lot of research showing that
(37:00):
pipeline and underrepresentation issues aren't necessarily about complications from having
a family or even conscious discriminatory actions, or obviously anything
to do with innate ability. So Urie has pondered and
written about a lot what is the issue, what's going on?
And something that comes up a lot for her is
(37:21):
unconscious gender bias. Yeah, and she points to several studies
that have shown that work associated with a woman's name
isn't as highly rated as that associated with a man's name.
She also mentions that in letters of recommendation, women are
more likely to get words like reliable, while a man
will be deemed brilliant, and also the fact that women
(37:43):
and men don't necessarily respond to mentors coaching styles the same.
She also points out that the way that we're socialized
could have a lot to do with it. As I
mean as women, not just as like people or astronomers
or whoever. She instructs women to own your ambition. She writes,
it really scares me the way young women dial back
their aspirations because they're anticipating that they'll have to make compromises.
(38:06):
Believe me, the young men aren't doing that. Okay, so
when's the last time we heard that? Kristen from Cheryl
Sandberg and lean in, Yeah, it sounds very lean in e.
She talks a lot about women needing to work at
something they love and something that they can publish high
impact papers about, so they can really make their mark
(38:27):
in that community because it is a small and prestigious
community and also develop connections with other women in science.
There's a lot of networking going on intentionally among women
in these STEM fields, and it's not just an issue though.
When it comes to representation of people in STEM, it's
not just women. There's also a lot of attention that's
(38:48):
been paid recently to ethnic minorities as well as LGBT
representation UM because, for instance, from ninety six to two
thousand three, only thirty five African American women in fifties
seven Hispanic women earned physics PhDs. From nineteen seventy six,
three and just seven African American women and twelve Hispanic
(39:12):
women earned astronomy PhDs. And honestly, all of the women
that we have highlighted up to this point, Caroline, have
been white. We should acknowledge that right and speaking about
boosting the representation of many types of people in astronomy
and having a greater amount of diversity. Vanderbilt University is
hosting the inaugural Inclusive Astronomy Meeting in June of this
(39:34):
year and their mission statement says that Inclusive Astronomy will
serve as a welcoming, strategic venue to advocate and provide
resources for the inclusion in the astronomy community of people
of color, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, queer or questioning people,
people with disabilities, women, and anyone who holds more than
(39:56):
one of these identities. Yeah, and on top of that,
we should mention and that the American Astronomical Society has
a working group on lgbt i Q equality to raise
awareness and fight discriminations. So it does sound like there
is progress being made in terms of representation, of paying
(40:16):
attention to these issues, of trying to level the playing field. Um,
so that bickerings women can finally be a past era
of astronomy. And I feel like a good place for
us to close out this conversation, Caroline, would be a
couple of living lady astronomers out there, because there is
(40:37):
one thing that jumped out to me in thinking about
astronomy and astrophysics today, when it comes to women, there
are no Lady carl Sagan's or Neil de grass Tyson's,
and yet there are these women doing incredible work. I
think that we need a woman astronomer rock star at
the level of Neil Degrass Tyson, whom I love nothing
(40:59):
against Neil de grass Tyson at all, um, But who
are who are a couple of potential Neil de grass
Tyson's I mean, we've mentioned med Yuri already and all
of the incredible work she's doing in terms of writing
about basically diversity she's in astronomy. But one big name
we should mention too is Sydney C. Wolf. She was
the first woman to serve as director of a major
(41:20):
U S observatory and to have led the construction of
six premier telescopes. She served as the director of the
National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Arizona from seven to two thousand,
and she helped develop world class observatory facilities in both
Arizona and Chile and so She served as also the
American Astronomical Society President in nineteen one, not bad for
(41:44):
a group that felt it needed an entire committee to
examine women's role in the organization. She's the founding editor
also of the Astronomy Education Review, and her research on
stellar atmospheres and the evolution, formation and composition of stars
is internationally recognized and Caroline. Since we started off the
podcast talking about comments, a good place to bring the
(42:08):
podcast full circle is Caroline Shoemaker for a couple of reasons.
First of all, Shoemaker holds the record for the most
comic discoveries get ready for this, folks. She's found more
than eight hundred asteroids and thirty two comments. And with
her husband Jean, she received the Written House Medal in
(42:28):
and the Scientists of the Year Award, and NASA awarded
her the Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal in And her story
is fascinating because she didn't get into astronomy on a
professional level until she was fifty one. First, she was
(42:48):
a stay at home mom and she always was interested
in her husband, Jean's work, and he often looped her
into field observations and work that he was doing. But
it was and until after that phase of being a
full time mom, that she's been transitioned into being this
incredible astronomer. And she worked with her husband, Jean until
(43:11):
he was killed in a tragic car accident at a
California observatory. So, no matter what age you are, if
you're listening to this podcast, it's not too late if
you're interested in astronomy. And I love this story though,
because I mean it really to me sums up so
much of women's history with astronomy because she's kind of
(43:36):
it goes back to the buttons and breakfasts this year
that we were talking about in Part one of that
concern of well, if women get too involved in astronomy,
then who's going to take care of the home? Well,
Carolin Schuebaker was like, I'll just do all of it. Yeah,
well yeah, And it also perfectly illustrates our our themes,
one of our themes from the first episode, which is
that so many women throughout history have gotten into stem fields,
(43:59):
stem job, stem hobbies and pathtimes thanks to the influence
of a father or a husband or whatever. And so
here you have a very modern woman, Carol and Shoemaker,
who is getting not only involved in astronomy but completely
pursuing it passionately as a career and making all these
discoveries in the wake of her husband's death. Yeah. So
(44:22):
with that, I hope that there's some astronomers listening. We
would love to hear from you, or people who are
just amateur stargazers or any folks involved in STEM, we
want to know your thoughts mom Stuff at house stuff
works dot com. Oh and if you have any suggestions
for the lady equivalence of Vanil de Grasse Tyson and
(44:43):
Carl Sagan. Really curious to know who your nominations would
be for Lady Astronomer rock Stars. Mom's stab at house
stuff works dot com. Again is our email address. You
can also tweet us at mom Stuff podcast or messages
on Facebook, and we've got a couple of messages to
share with you right now. All right, I have a
(45:05):
letter here from Steven following up on our history of
Underpant's episode Uh. Steven says, I found it interesting how
you mentioned that women's equivalent for men's clothing were not
only made more feminine through frills or lace, but also
through terms like lady alls instead of overalls. As a guy,
I've noticed the same phenomenon with men's equivalent for what
(45:25):
are considered traditionally feminine things, such as guyliner for eyeliner,
man purse for any bag a guy carries, and man's
scaping for his hair trimming choices. I carry a messenger
bag is my everyday carry all, and I prefer to
just call it my bag, or confront the occasional jokes
directly and just call it my purse. It's amazing just
how uncomfortable people can get when you start stepping over
(45:46):
the perceived gender lines, and how far they'll push to
keep everyone pinned into gender roles and expectations. Me, I'll
keep proudly flaunting my purse and wearing eyeliner wherever I go.
Thanks for all the work you put into the podcast,
and thank you Stephen for writing in Well. I've got
a letter here from Olga also about our history of
(46:06):
Women's Underwear episode, and the subject line is women's underwear
in nineteenth century Serbia. So here we go Algar Rights.
I'm a cultural anthropology student in Serbia and we had
a Serbian material culture class in which we discussed clothing,
among other things. Nineteenth century peasant clothing in the Balkan
region is influenced by both Western fashion, which came through
(46:29):
the city folk, and Eastern fashion because most of these
countries were part of the Ottoman Empire for a long time,
which I find endlessly fascinating. As a result of this
kind of cultural collision, there were some mixed feelings about
the transition to underwear. Turkish women traditionally were pants, under
skirts that were split in the front, and vests instead
(46:49):
of constricting corsets. Serbian peasants also wore vests instead. Of course,
it's no underwear of any kind except sometimes a chemise
and cheer white skirt. It's that fell just below the knee.
And because that didn't cover anything at all, most parts
of the country covered it with another article of clothing,
mostly aprons, and peasant clothing was highly symbolic, so if
(47:11):
you wove a certain color through your wool and apron
while you were making it, you could express all sorts
of personal feelings and social status is like a certain
color might indicate marital status. So anyway, when the city
women started wearing underwear, the country, folks, all is something
that only rich women, women in sports and prostitutes might wear.
And also since poor country women didn't get to rest
(47:33):
while they got their period, they would have to work
through it. Meanwhile, I'm down for the account for at
least two days when aunt flow comes along. And don't
even get me started on dealing with pregnancy in the
nineteenth century. Anyway, I love listening to you people talk
about cool things. Keep doing what you're doing, so thanks.
I'll go for that insight into nineteenth century serbian underwear,
(47:57):
and now I kind of wish that I had a
symbolic wool and a brandy. So if you have any
costume history or facts about astronomers or anything else you'd
like to share with us, Mom stuff at house. Stuff
works dot Com is our email address and for links
to all of our social media as well as all
of our blogs, videos, and podcasts, including this one with
all of our sources so you can follow along, head
(48:19):
on over to stuff mom Never Told You dot com
for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is
it how stuff works dot com
Hey, this is Annie, Samantha. I love for Stephane never
told your production of iHeart Radio. So, Samantha, when I
told you we were doing these classic episodes on women
in space, you immediately started singing Rocket Rocket Man by
(00:29):
Elison John. Obviously, I and you immediately went to space Jam.
Apparently space Jam, Yeah, because one time I went to
a nineties party and I had met on my space
jam Jersey, which I know has made an appearance on
our Instagram, and somebody requested that song and it but
I didn't sing it or anything, but I like gotten
(00:49):
the center and people freaked out. It was the best
because they love you. They're very excited about space Jam
or one of the other. But I guess for space songs,
I think of ground Controlled the major Tom probably first.
But I wanted to ask you how about the Armageddon song? Oh?
(01:12):
You know, I was thinking about that the other day
because when our class when I was in sixth grade,
we went on a field ship to space Camp. It's
just a very formative experience for me in a lot
of ways. And on the bus, our teacher put on
Armageddon forgetting that there is a strip club scene and
(01:33):
also that kind of weird animal Cracker. Yeah, we've ben
Affleck And what's your Tyler lived? I lived Tyler. I
was gonna say Liz, and I'm like, it's not Liz
and she turned it off and we all were like no,
and she put on Flubber instead and we were like,
(01:54):
this is not all that I was gonna ask. Is
ee mainly a non stick order? Probably? But do you
have any like horror movie are kind of like a
movie you know that isn't really that great, but for
some reason, you catch yourself wanting to watch it a lot,
watch it a lot. Well, you would accuse me of
(02:16):
doing that with The Mummy too, I feel like, which
was a whole thing. I don't know if I would
say I don't love it, just like it just become
a habit that I've watched a lot of Star Wars
a lot and all of the subsequent series that goes
(02:36):
with it, and now I'm getting a lot of updates
with that as well. So do those count? Yeah? Sure,
I guess I have like a roster of horror movies
that I would say are not They're not necessarily bad,
but they're not good. But for some reason, I just
I'm like, you know what. I want to watch that
that movie again. One of them is this movie called Coherence,
(02:58):
which I watched last night actually, but it's about like
a comet coming close to the earth and then it
messes up like all these alternate realities, and there's this
whole plot point of you're trying to mark your house
so you know that you're at the right reality, and
(03:19):
so you like random numbers and pictures and items in
a box. And I was telling a friend of mine
about this, and she said something about we need to
come up with us saying, and she's, Malla is where
the money is. And she was talking about the holiday
special and she's she said, no one in any reality
(03:42):
has ever uttered that scenence. For It's like, I think,
you're right, We've created a beacon. This is a reality.
I know now it's gonna spread. You're right, I gotta
come up with something else. I'm going to keep it
to myself. It's true, you know what, though, And the
another one that I have not necessarily just continue to watch,
(04:03):
but it's new and it's about a new planet is
raised by wolves, which our friend Holly Fried has done
a podcast in conjunction with that. HBO Max show, which
have you watched this at all? Should? I? Well, let
me just give you a preference. Likes. There's a war,
there's androids, and they go to a new planet and
they're trying to save humanity, and it is an interesting
(04:26):
movie about what it would look like to settle on
a new planet, which I feel like that's what we're
trying to do with Mars. Right. Oh yeah, you weren't
working for us at this point, Smantha. But a couple
of years back, our boss at the time send out
this article about how we were all going to be
on Mars. It was it was a really good article. Um,
I have my doubts, but I do enjoy a space
(04:52):
thriller harm movie sci fi usually scare me pretty good,
which I like. But anyway, all that being said, yes,
there has been a lot of space news, so we
thought we would bringing back these classics on women and stargazing,
So please enjoy. Welcome to Stuff Mom Never told You
(05:13):
from House Supports dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Kristin and I'm Caroline, and welcome to part two
of our Stargazing Women's series about women in astronomy and
before we dive in Caroline. I had a moment of
(05:35):
astronomical synchronicity happen in the car yesterday. Can I tell
you about it? Because I got so excited because we
were doing this podcast today. So I'm listening to NPR
per usual, and an announcement comes on talking about this
comment called the love Joy comment that was passing over Atlanta,
(05:56):
where Caroline and I are located. And I got really excited,
not so much about the comment, but because they interviewed
a woman astronomer at our local fern Bank Observatory all
about this comment, and I was like, oh, this is
a woman. She the podcast has come alive. It's a
(06:20):
woman astronomer. They exist, and she's so excited about the
stars and here this whole time, I thought when the
podcast came alive, it would be on Ice. No, not,
that's later. Okay, that's a that's one. That's a project
still in the works. You and I have to get
our our ice dancing. Yes, yes, um, but yeah, I
(06:41):
really nerded out in my car by myself. There was
no one to tell, so I just kind of yelped aloud.
Yes I was doing the same thing, but in my
bathroom getting ready to come to Wark. You heard the
same announcement I did. It's like it's as if we
both listened to NPR. Yeah, it's like we're both total
nerds who knew um. When we left off in part one,
(07:04):
we had gotten up into this factory system of astronomical observations.
Women like Maria Mitchell were starting to make inroads in
terms of women and astronomy. You had observatory set up
at some women's colleges like Vasser, but we were still
kind of pushed off to this side in a lot
(07:25):
of ways. Right. A lot of the women who were
in astronomy in this era were definitely in the more
clerical positions. And it wasn't because hey, women are so smart,
we love women. Put them in the clerical positions so
they'll they'll make amazing discoveries. The popular opinion was more like,
we don't trust women to use their delicate lady brains,
so let's put them in these clerical positions so they
(07:47):
can pour over astro photography data for hours on end.
But the great thing is that even in these positions
of you know, supposed lesser power or lesser ability, they
still managed to make pretty amazing discoveries. And one of
the biggest names in this whole factory like setting of
astronomy was Charles Pickering at the Harvard Observatory. So, thanks
(08:12):
to photographic technology that was developing at the time, they
were able to see more than ever before. But they
needed to analyze all of these snapshots of the sky
that they were getting and it was very, very tedious work. Yeah,
and so Pickering had this guy as his assistant and
I don't know what the guy was doing. I don't
(08:32):
know if he's fallen asleep on the job, but either way,
he's just letting Pickering down. And so Pickering was like,
screw you, dude, you're not doing your job. I need
somebody who's actually competent. And who did he consider to
be competent around him? Well, that would be Willemina Fleming,
his maid. She's a single mother who Pickering brings on
(08:53):
as his astronomy assistant because he's like, I know you,
you hang out around me a lot, and you're pretty competent.
And so he passes along all of this astrophotography analysis
to Fleming, who ends up working at Harvard for more
than thirty four years thanks to her skill at computing
and copying, and she was the first woman to have
(09:13):
a formal appointment there. And during Pickering's time at Harvard,
which lasted from eighteen seventy seven to nineteen nineteen, more
than eighty women worked for him and mostly clerical capacities,
doing computing and cataloging work, and they are referred to
often as Pickering's women, or alternatively as Pickering's harem. Yeah,
(09:36):
that's just great, that's so great. Yeah, lots of lots
of respect, so much respect. But they were doing important
work despite the stupid name. They provided data that ended
up forming the empirical basis for larger astronomical theory. But
of course they were earning just twenty five to fifty
cents an hour, half of what a man would have
(09:58):
been paid in the same position. Yeah, and the Hard
Observatory is an interesting case study in how women contributed
more data, particularly on variable stars which your stars that
change in brightness, than their counterparts did. And it's largely
due to this system that they had set up of
(10:19):
all working together and sharing information and collaborating. And I've
got to give a shout out now to Cosmos, the
show hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson, which in the episode
Sisters of the Sun, he takes the time to focus
on the women in the Harvard Observatory who were laying
(10:40):
the foundation for all of these incredible astronomical discoveries to come,
because without Pickering's women, we would know so much less
about the stars in the sky. Absolutely, and Doritt Hofflett
from Yale University, who herself was a giant name in
astronomy about variable stars in particular, and she talked about
(11:02):
how from the eighteen eighties, so Pickering's time to the
nineteen fifties, women contributed way more data on these types
of stars. Variable stars are the kind that change brightness
than their male counterparts did. By nineteen fifty nine, in fact,
women including will Amina Fleming, had discovered more than seventy
of the more than fourteen thousand named variable stars then know,
(11:25):
But we should back up first for a minute. Yeah,
we need to hop back to eight nine six when
a woman named Annie jump Cannon transfers from Wellesley, where
she helped conduct experiments on X rays, to Radcliffe College
in order to make her way into Pickering's observatory. And
(11:45):
what she did was simplify Pickering and will Amina Fleming's
system for classifying stars and the work that Canon does.
The simplest way to explain it is that she, I mean,
she almost set up like a Dewey decimal system for
the stars. She figured out how to categorize and label
(12:06):
all of them. I mean, then this is still a
system that we used today, right, And in nine two,
this this definitely did not go unnoticed because in nineteen
two the International Astronomical Union ended up adopting her method
of categorizing stars, which was based on their temperatures, as
the official classification system. So that's no small potatoes, and
(12:26):
she received a whole lot of accolades going forward. In
five she was the first woman to be awarded an
honorary doctorate from the University of Oxford, and in nineteen
thirty three, after becoming the first woman officer in the
American Astronomical Society, she established their Annie Jump Canon Award,
which is given to a North American female astronomer four
(12:47):
distinguished contributions to the field. And we will have more
to say about that award and how it changed later
in this nineteen seventies. But in nineteen thirty eight Harvard
appointed Canon the William C. Bond, Professor of astra Enemy.
So she is definitely one of the huge names in astronomy,
specifically as someone who came out of Fleming's you know,
(13:10):
group of women. I won't say Harem, I just said harem. Yeah,
we need a better name rather than I don't even
like pickerings women. Does that even sound so possessive? So
maybe we should rename them, I mean Sisters of the Sun,
which is what Neil deGrasse Tyson called them, or whoever
wrote his scripts. I thought was pretty good. And at
the end of that episode side note Caroline, he's drinking
(13:32):
some wine with this older woman. I think he's in
Italy or something, and he looks into the camera and
raises his wine glass and toast the Sisters of the Sun,
and it says that's well he should. It's an amazing moment.
But anyway, there's another woman that we need to mention.
He was working alongside Annie jump Cannon at this time.
(13:53):
She actually joined the Harvard Observatory in just a year
prior to Annie jump Cannon. And this is Henrietta Swan Levitt.
And what she did was figure out a way to
measure the distance of stars really really really far away.
It's something called the Seafia variable period luminosity relationship. Of course, yeah,
(14:18):
I mean which obviously um so it's often referred to
as the distance key. And this made possible all subsequent
discoveries in astronomy of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries because
they could finally get dimensions to these farther away kinds
of stars. So not only do we have Cannon who
(14:39):
is labeling and categorizing all these stars, now we have
Levet coming along to offer some distance in there. And
then when we get to we have Cecilia Payne, who
then offers us this breakthrough information on the composition of
the stars. Right. And so what's interesting about Cecilia Paine
(15:02):
is that, you know, she makes these amazing contributions, but
there's a little bit of self doubt in there. But
first let's establish why she's so awesome. Cecilia Paine is
the first person to receive a PhD from the Harvard
Astronomy Department, and her thesis rocks the astrophysics world because
she demonstrated that the Sun was made almost exclusively from
hydrogen and helium, thus its makeup was way different from
(15:26):
the Earth because leading up to the scientists had thought
that the Earth and the Sun were basically composed similarly.
But you know, Kristen, you and I have talked about
the imposter syndrome on the podcast before. To protect her reputation,
Paine inserted a clause at the beginning of her thesis
stating that the results were quote probably not real. Just
(15:47):
in case somebody laughed at her or said this is ridiculous.
She was like, oh, hey, I'm just gonna put this
here about what the Sun is made of. But who knows,
maybe it's wrong. Well, I mean she had already gotten
flat from professors. I forget, there's a specific guy at
Harvard who had looked at her work and was really
skeptical just because it was such a revolutionary idea. And
(16:11):
imagine too that your Cecilia Paine, and she came to
the United States from Britain specifically because in Britain at
the time, she couldn't go to college, she couldn't study
alongside men. So I mean, imposter syndrome on top of
impost syndrome for this woman who is studying theoretical and
(16:31):
anatomical physics and blowing people's minds at a time when
in the place that she's from she wasn't even allowed
to go to school, right, And her work ended up
laying the foundation for our understanding of stars compositions in general,
not just the sun, and a Guardian article referred to
it as the astrophysical equivalent of Darwin's origin of the species,
(16:53):
so clearly laying some amazing groundwork for astronomy. So did
a similar pattern of allowing or women into the fold
happened during World War Two for women in astronomy as well. Yeah,
I mean it definitely did. World War two shook up society,
as we know and have talked about many times on
the podcast. STEM jobs were definitely no exception because as
(17:15):
we've seen from the last episode on Astronomy and as
we're talking about now, educational and professional opportunities were definitely
expanding as more women's colleges were opening their doors to
researchers and helping women get a foot in the door.
Um not to mention the the social change as far
as ideas about women not being physically or mentally fit
(17:37):
to work outside the home or in scientific fields were
starting to fall away, and the notion about married women
needing to stay home was also falling away. Of course
it's not totally though, because that's still kind of as around.
But during the war, during World War Two, there were
fewer male grad students around, and so there was a
relative increase in the number of female astronomers in the
(18:00):
nineteen In particular in the United States, the National Science
Foundation estimated that bachelor's degrees in physics reached a high
of up from fourteen percent in nineteen forty. And the
reason that we're pointing out physics and in particulars that
most astronomy grad students do have a physics degree. And
(18:20):
thanks to the technological research happening during World War One
that's fueled by military pursuits, astronomy is still an evolving
field because you get the emergence of radio astronomy, which
happened during the war thanks to radar research, and so
you have this combinations of new fields and branches within
the field and also fewer men. So in Australia, Ruby
(18:45):
Payne Scott became one of the first radio astronomers and
was the first woman radio astronomer, and she was also
an author on numerous early papers and became a scientific
leader until after the war, right, Yeah, when the men
start coming home from the war and women's overall numbers
not only in the workforce in general, but also in
(19:07):
astronomy and other stem fields. When men's numbers increase, in
women's numbers decrease. After the war, pain Scott still managed
to make huge contributions to the understanding of solar radio
bursts and the development of radio astronomical techniques and instruments.
So that's great, right, Like she managed to hold on
(19:29):
when so many women were shoved out of the workforce
when men came home. It didn't last long because even
though I literally just mentioned a second ago that the
idea that women needed to stay home and be wives
and mothers and oh you better not higher wives and mothers,
because women in the workforce are obviously like aberrations of
the norm. Ruby pain Scott was doing great. She had
(19:53):
to hide the fact though, that she was getting married,
and when she got pregnant she ended up having to
resign from the field. And of course this follows the
fact that she was also suspected of being a comy
and was definitely an outspoken feminist about getting other women
involved in astronomy and stem fields, and so people were like, wait,
so you're a comi feminist, outspoken scientific lady and now
(20:18):
you're getting married and having a child. Get out of here.
The world was not ready for Ruby Payne Scott. Now
it sounds like well, and when it comes so to
that whole marriage factor, this is a pattern that you're
gonna see throughout the next few decades in terms of
UM observatories and research facilities having these anti nepotism rules,
(20:42):
which essentially meant that if your husband is working in
a lab, then his your the wife is not going
to be allowed to work in the lab because that's
what they considered nepotism, which actually hampered a lot of
women's careers because I mean, it makes sense that you know,
you're an astrophysicist, you meet another astroid physicist, you fall
(21:04):
in love. You know, stars in your eyes literally the
stars aligned. So there, you know, that's that's that's sort
of a downer of a rule for a number of
these astronomers astronomers working. But of course, when it comes
to this anti nepotism rule, it's the wife who has
to go home, not the husband typically, which leads us
(21:26):
to second wave feminism. Yes, according to the National Science Foundation.
Though from nineteen fifty to nineteen seventy the proportion of
women earning bachelor's degrees in physics states still at about
four to six percent, So not a ton of women
studying physics. Yeah, but when you move into the sixties
and seventies, the numbers start to increase. In nineteen seventy two,
(21:49):
for instance, if we're talking about bachelor's degrees, women earned
seventeen percent of bachelor's degrees in astronomy. And during that
period of the sixties to the seventies, while the nomber
of female PhDs rose, the percentage of women in the
American Astronomical Society, for instance, dropped to just eight percent
by nineteen seventy three. So the numbers are sort of
(22:10):
all over the place. And during this time the job
prospects are still terrible for married women. There was a
lot of fear about women taking time off to have children.
Oh yeah, the workplace issues for working moms. In astronomy
echoes so many of the workplace issues we still hear
about today for working moms, that whole sneering at part
(22:31):
time work of trying to balance family and this really
intensive research because understandably astronomy is like say, being a
lawyer is a field that requires and you're expected to
pour so many hours. It's not a forty hour week
kind of gig. And with that, there are still echoes
(22:53):
of the Pickering's women or Pickering's harem era going on. Um,
which leads us to the story Joscelyn Bell Burnell who
discovered pull stars. F y. I pull stars are remnants
of massive stars after they've exploded. And I think that
before Burnell figured that out, we thought that they were aliens. Really, yeah,
(23:16):
the little green men. Really yep, I had no idea.
I'm learning so much from you, Kristen. Well, I'm just
I just learned a lot from Dale Grass Tyson. So well,
there we go. Um, and this is coming from National Geographic.
But in nineteen sixty seven, Burnell, as you said, discovered
pulsars while she was in grad school four radio astronomy.
Hey Ruby Paine Scott at Cambridge in England. And Burnell
(23:42):
was just, you know, no big deal, studying three miles
worth of paper from a radio telescope that she helped
build when she made this discovery, and hooray it resulted
in a Nobel Prize that's wonderful, right, Yeah, but the
Nobel Prize went to her male supervised there and another
male astronomer. Yeah. So Burnell, the way that she explains
(24:05):
it is the picture people had at the time of
the way that science was done was that there was
a senior man, and it was always a man who
had under him a whole load of minions, junior staff
who weren't expected to think, who were only expected to
do as he said. So, how did I mean that
sounds exactly like pickerings women. Yeah. And I heard an
interview with Burrell on the BBC not that long ago,
(24:29):
and they played a clip of the male supervisor who
had received the Nobel Prize, and he stood by it.
He essentially said, well, you just have to understand that
there's a difference between the captain of the ship and
the crew. So when you know, if there's a successful voyage,
who's really to think? And so, I mean, this guy
(24:50):
clearly fancies himself a captain of of a pleasure group.
Do you think he wears like a jaunty captain? Sat? Yes,
I knew. And Belle Burnell, when she was asked by
the bb SEE reporter for her response to that she
was essentially like, that's where he stands. If I got
if I continued to get mad about this every day,
(25:11):
then I would not be able to do any work.
But she made so clear how challenging it was constantly
to be a woman in this field, even before the
whole balancing of family and career. When she first walked
into like an auditorium sized classroom in college, all of
(25:32):
the men in the room started stamping their feet and
whooping because that was just tradition, because she was, you know,
the only woman in the room, and so of course
she was going to get heckled. And so that's what
was happening when she was in graduate school. And then
she gets the Nobel Prize just snatched out from under her.
And a National Geographic points out that even though yes,
(25:56):
this woman discovered pool stars should have been given a
Nobel Prize, a cetera, many of the positions she was
offered in her career were focused on teaching or administrative
and management duties because that was still seen as more
women appropriate work. Yeah, and she does point out that
it was extremely hard combining family and career, which is
something that women today obviously still struggle with. Times have
(26:19):
not changed that much. But as of Burnell was a
visiting astronomy professor at the University of Oxford. She recently
chaired a working group for the Royal Society of Edinburgh
and she was tasked with finding a strategy to boost
the number of women in stem fields in Scotland. And
there was one more think here only that jumped out
to me. In that BBC interview we mentioned that the
(26:42):
impostor syndrome and Cecilia Paine's work in the nineteen twenties.
Bell Burnell specifically called out the impostor syndrome as well,
and as she even asked the report, she was like,
if you ever heard of this thing called the impostor syndrome. Yeah,
it's essentially been something I've had to fight every single
day of my career, that sense of oh, well, no,
(27:03):
I'm going to be found out at some point because
I surely I don't belong here. But obviously those feelings
of not belonging have nothing to do with her actual
intelligence and prowess, but the environment, the hostile environment she's
been working in now for decades. And then as we
moved through the nineteen seventies, there are a couple more
developments in the field of astronomy that had a lot
(27:26):
to do with women. Um in nineteen seventy one asked
her physicist Margaret Bourbage declined the Cannon Prize. Now we
mentioned the Cannon Prize earlier. It was supposed to go to,
you know, incredible female astronomers who've made great strides and
made great contributions to the field. But Bourbage said that
the prize was discriminatory because it was available only to women.
(27:47):
And the direct result of this was that the American
Astronomical Society established basically a Lady Committee that recommended the
prize become a research award for which women in early
stages of their career years could apply. The reasoning being
that women faced numerous disadvantages early on in their education,
(28:08):
uh in their grad school career and getting a career
going off the ground, and so yeah, basically the reasoning
was like, if we give it to women who are
still in school, then that's not as discriminatory. And so
in nineteen seventy two they recommended that the a S
set up a group to review the status of women
in astronomy, and in nineteen seventy three that new Committee,
the Working Group on the Status of Women in Astronomy
(28:30):
released a report where they found that the percent of
women in the a S was the lowest ever in
its history, that women were underrepresentative officers and other people
in this group, and that the United States was seventh,
and the percentage of female members of the International Astronomy Union.
So basically, basically, this group is like, hey, women aren't
(28:51):
in enough places in astronomy. Yeah. And as a result
of all this information that they're finding out, the data
that their collecting about women in the field, in ninety
Working Group on Women finally became a standing committee and
as a result of their work, members developed what was
(29:12):
called the Baltimore Charter, which had the goal of promoting
a culture that would help both men and women realize
their full potential in STEM careers. So the question that
is what is that full potential look like for astronomers today.
We'll talk about that when we come right back from
a quick break and now back to the show. So, Caroline,
(29:39):
what does being an astronomer entailed today? I mean, is
it have we learned everything there is to know about
the stars? I mean certainly not. You know, as we
mentioned in our first episode on women in Astronomy. Some
major discoveries were still being made in the nineteen nineties,
back when that Women's Committee was developing charter ys to
(30:00):
encourage people in the field of astronomy. We still have
so much to discover. But the field of astronomy itself
is relatively small, and this is coming from numbers from
the Bureau of Labor and Statistics. There are only about
six thousand professional astronomers in North America, and it's super
competitive because there are a hundred and fifty North American
(30:20):
job openings per year and there are one hundred and
twenty five pH d grads per year, so a lot
of people vying for not that many jobs. Yeah, and
if you do get a job, though, pays pretty well
to be an astronomer. In the median pay was one
hundred and six thousand dollars per year or per hour
(30:42):
if you're you know, wanted to keep track of it
that way. And the kinds of things obviously that you'd
be studying include planets, stars, galaxies, and other celestial bodies.
And there's all sorts of equipment that's involved as well,
including ground based equipment like radio and optical telescopes as
well as space based equipment such as the Hubble space telescope,
(31:02):
which a lot of listeners have probably heard of. And
you generally are either making observations are working on theory.
So what are some of the modern observations that astronomers
today have been making, Caroline, Well, it's not so much
that astronomers are looking through a telescope and sweeping the
(31:22):
sky as the ladies in our first episode did very often,
but rather use computers and super sophisticated telescopes that can
detect radiation other than visible lights, such as gamma rays
or radio waves, and rather than making direct observations by
sweeping the sky with a telescope, theoretical astronomers typically use
data from observational astronomers to develop theories. And we should
(31:47):
also mention too that telescope technology has also spawned numerous
medical applications, so there are day to day repercussions of
the work that astronomers are doing, and typically they're employed
at colleges, universities, and professional schools um they're also involved
in research and development in the physical, engineering, and life sciences,
(32:10):
and of course, if you are in aspiring astronomer or astrophysicists.
You can get a job with the federal government. You
can work for NASA or the Department of Defense. Right,
only of astronomers and astrophysicists end up in those cushy,
high paying federal government jobs like NASA. Most of them
(32:32):
are at colleges and stuff. But all right, so now
that we've laid out what astronomers are doing today, that
they're using big supercomputers, what does it look like out
there for ladies today in astronomy. Well, astronomy is usually
highlighted as a stem field that is friendlier to women,
which seems ironic considering you know, the Joscel and Bell
(32:55):
Burnell stories and the other ones that we've shared um.
But by and large it does tend to attract more
women than other stem fields, but it still suffers similar
leaky pipeline issues as we see all over stems. So
when it comes to the pipeline issue, it's usually the
same old tale of women starting out they're interested in physics,
(33:19):
are taking the courses and their bachelor's degrees, but they
don't make it to the PhD level. And then if
they make it a PhD level, there's a drop off
after that as well, right, And a lot of these
numbers though, can be deceiving. It really depends on what
phase of a woman's science career or astronomy career looking at.
Because we mentioned that uh, physics and physics bachelor's degrees
(33:44):
were important to talk about because typically that can lead
then to astronomy um And so when you look back
at middle school and high school, girls make up half
of physics students, but that number definitely drops way off
in high school and definitely in higher ed vucation. But
you also have to keep in mind that most high
(34:04):
school students or a lot of high school students have
to take things like physics or chemistry or whatever, and
so it's just important to keep in mind that, well, yes,
there is a pipeline issue. Sometimes you just have to
remember that certain things are inflating numbers and parts of
the pipeline. So if we look at higher education, and
(34:26):
this number is coming from two thousand three, so it's
a little bit dated, but women earn of physics bachelor's
degrees and forty percent of astronomy bachelor's degree. So you
see there about astronomy bachelor's degree. So hey, we're earning
almost half of them. Well done. Also, I can do
simple math um now. Now, when it comes to the
(34:49):
faculty and stand alone astronomy departments, women make up only
four percent of faculty members versus ten percent in physics departments,
so you might there too have shoes going on with
the whole visibility factor. You don't see many women at
the front of the classroom in physics and astronomy. Yeah,
but there is good news and bad news when it
(35:11):
comes to women teaching and higher education. Women are being
hired into the professorial ranks at better than their availability rate,
but the proportion of women in temporary faculty positions and
like assistant professor positions is even higher. So there's still
a little bit of echoes of pickerings women where well,
(35:31):
it's great that they're getting into this field, many of
them are still filling the lower positions. But M. I. T. S.
Claude cannas Are has found that women were tenured actually
at a slightly higher rate than men, and that the
clock stopping so to speak, to have or adopted child
actually did not affect women's likelihood of being tenured. That
(35:52):
is so surprised. That is so surprising because whenever it
comes to women in academia in general, it's usually that
whole tenure track of having to do not only teach,
but also do the research and get published, and just
all of the hours involved in that that requires to
get tenured is often cited as the you know, primary
reason for that that drop off in women UM. But
(36:15):
when it comes to some gender imparity in physics and astronomy,
the US is not alone in this. Most countries, in fact,
award less than a quarter of their first level university
physics degrees to women, and most grant less than of
their physics PhDs to women. But there is a PhD
that we need to mention. Astrophysicist Meg Garry, who has
(36:39):
been one leading the charge in terms of calling for
more recognition of issues affecting women in STEM how do
we close the leaky pipeline? Obviously providing visibility as a
female astrophysicist UM. She has echoed what knas Aris said
in terms of there's a lot of research showing that
(37:00):
pipeline and underrepresentation issues aren't necessarily about complications from having
a family or even conscious discriminatory actions, or obviously anything
to do with innate ability. So Urie has pondered and
written about a lot what is the issue, what's going on?
And something that comes up a lot for her is
(37:21):
unconscious gender bias. Yeah, and she points to several studies
that have shown that work associated with a woman's name
isn't as highly rated as that associated with a man's name.
She also mentions that in letters of recommendation, women are
more likely to get words like reliable, while a man
will be deemed brilliant, and also the fact that women
(37:43):
and men don't necessarily respond to mentors coaching styles the same.
She also points out that the way that we're socialized
could have a lot to do with it. As I
mean as women, not just as like people or astronomers
or whoever. She instructs women to own your ambition. She writes,
it really scares me the way young women dial back
their aspirations because they're anticipating that they'll have to make compromises.
(38:06):
Believe me, the young men aren't doing that. Okay, so
when's the last time we heard that? Kristen from Cheryl
Sandberg and lean in, Yeah, it sounds very lean in e.
She talks a lot about women needing to work at
something they love and something that they can publish high
impact papers about, so they can really make their mark
(38:27):
in that community because it is a small and prestigious
community and also develop connections with other women in science.
There's a lot of networking going on intentionally among women
in these STEM fields, and it's not just an issue though.
When it comes to representation of people in STEM, it's
not just women. There's also a lot of attention that's
(38:48):
been paid recently to ethnic minorities as well as LGBT
representation UM because, for instance, from ninety six to two
thousand three, only thirty five African American women in fifties
seven Hispanic women earned physics PhDs. From nineteen seventy six,
three and just seven African American women and twelve Hispanic
(39:12):
women earned astronomy PhDs. And honestly, all of the women
that we have highlighted up to this point, Caroline, have
been white. We should acknowledge that right and speaking about
boosting the representation of many types of people in astronomy
and having a greater amount of diversity. Vanderbilt University is
hosting the inaugural Inclusive Astronomy Meeting in June of this
(39:34):
year and their mission statement says that Inclusive Astronomy will
serve as a welcoming, strategic venue to advocate and provide
resources for the inclusion in the astronomy community of people
of color, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, queer or questioning people,
people with disabilities, women, and anyone who holds more than
(39:56):
one of these identities. Yeah, and on top of that,
we should mention and that the American Astronomical Society has
a working group on lgbt i Q equality to raise
awareness and fight discriminations. So it does sound like there
is progress being made in terms of representation, of paying
(40:16):
attention to these issues, of trying to level the playing field. Um,
so that bickerings women can finally be a past era
of astronomy. And I feel like a good place for
us to close out this conversation, Caroline, would be a
couple of living lady astronomers out there, because there is
(40:37):
one thing that jumped out to me in thinking about
astronomy and astrophysics today, when it comes to women, there
are no Lady carl Sagan's or Neil de grass Tyson's,
and yet there are these women doing incredible work. I
think that we need a woman astronomer rock star at
the level of Neil Degrass Tyson, whom I love nothing
(40:59):
against Neil de grass Tyson at all, um, But who
are who are a couple of potential Neil de grass
Tyson's I mean, we've mentioned med Yuri already and all
of the incredible work she's doing in terms of writing
about basically diversity she's in astronomy. But one big name
we should mention too is Sydney C. Wolf. She was
the first woman to serve as director of a major
(41:20):
U S observatory and to have led the construction of
six premier telescopes. She served as the director of the
National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Arizona from seven to two thousand,
and she helped develop world class observatory facilities in both
Arizona and Chile and so She served as also the
American Astronomical Society President in nineteen one, not bad for
(41:44):
a group that felt it needed an entire committee to
examine women's role in the organization. She's the founding editor
also of the Astronomy Education Review, and her research on
stellar atmospheres and the evolution, formation and composition of stars
is internationally recognized and Caroline. Since we started off the
podcast talking about comments, a good place to bring the
(42:08):
podcast full circle is Caroline Shoemaker for a couple of reasons.
First of all, Shoemaker holds the record for the most
comic discoveries get ready for this, folks. She's found more
than eight hundred asteroids and thirty two comments. And with
her husband Jean, she received the Written House Medal in
(42:28):
and the Scientists of the Year Award, and NASA awarded
her the Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal in And her story
is fascinating because she didn't get into astronomy on a
professional level until she was fifty one. First, she was
(42:48):
a stay at home mom and she always was interested
in her husband, Jean's work, and he often looped her
into field observations and work that he was doing. But
it was and until after that phase of being a
full time mom, that she's been transitioned into being this
incredible astronomer. And she worked with her husband, Jean until
(43:11):
he was killed in a tragic car accident at a
California observatory. So, no matter what age you are, if
you're listening to this podcast, it's not too late if
you're interested in astronomy. And I love this story though,
because I mean it really to me sums up so
much of women's history with astronomy because she's kind of
(43:36):
it goes back to the buttons and breakfasts this year
that we were talking about in Part one of that
concern of well, if women get too involved in astronomy,
then who's going to take care of the home? Well,
Carolin Schuebaker was like, I'll just do all of it. Yeah,
well yeah, And it also perfectly illustrates our our themes,
one of our themes from the first episode, which is
that so many women throughout history have gotten into stem fields,
(43:59):
stem job, stem hobbies and pathtimes thanks to the influence
of a father or a husband or whatever. And so
here you have a very modern woman, Carol and Shoemaker,
who is getting not only involved in astronomy but completely
pursuing it passionately as a career and making all these
discoveries in the wake of her husband's death. Yeah. So
(44:22):
with that, I hope that there's some astronomers listening. We
would love to hear from you, or people who are
just amateur stargazers or any folks involved in STEM, we
want to know your thoughts mom Stuff at house stuff
works dot com. Oh and if you have any suggestions
for the lady equivalence of Vanil de Grasse Tyson and
(44:43):
Carl Sagan. Really curious to know who your nominations would
be for Lady Astronomer rock Stars. Mom's stab at house
stuff works dot com. Again is our email address. You
can also tweet us at mom Stuff podcast or messages
on Facebook, and we've got a couple of messages to
share with you right now. All right, I have a
(45:05):
letter here from Steven following up on our history of
Underpant's episode Uh. Steven says, I found it interesting how
you mentioned that women's equivalent for men's clothing were not
only made more feminine through frills or lace, but also
through terms like lady alls instead of overalls. As a guy,
I've noticed the same phenomenon with men's equivalent for what
(45:25):
are considered traditionally feminine things, such as guyliner for eyeliner,
man purse for any bag a guy carries, and man's
scaping for his hair trimming choices. I carry a messenger
bag is my everyday carry all, and I prefer to
just call it my bag, or confront the occasional jokes
directly and just call it my purse. It's amazing just
how uncomfortable people can get when you start stepping over
(45:46):
the perceived gender lines, and how far they'll push to
keep everyone pinned into gender roles and expectations. Me, I'll
keep proudly flaunting my purse and wearing eyeliner wherever I go.
Thanks for all the work you put into the podcast,
and thank you Stephen for writing in Well. I've got
a letter here from Olga also about our history of
(46:06):
Women's Underwear episode, and the subject line is women's underwear
in nineteenth century Serbia. So here we go Algar Rights.
I'm a cultural anthropology student in Serbia and we had
a Serbian material culture class in which we discussed clothing,
among other things. Nineteenth century peasant clothing in the Balkan
region is influenced by both Western fashion, which came through
(46:29):
the city folk, and Eastern fashion because most of these
countries were part of the Ottoman Empire for a long time,
which I find endlessly fascinating. As a result of this
kind of cultural collision, there were some mixed feelings about
the transition to underwear. Turkish women traditionally were pants, under
skirts that were split in the front, and vests instead
(46:49):
of constricting corsets. Serbian peasants also wore vests instead. Of course,
it's no underwear of any kind except sometimes a chemise
and cheer white skirt. It's that fell just below the knee.
And because that didn't cover anything at all, most parts
of the country covered it with another article of clothing,
mostly aprons, and peasant clothing was highly symbolic, so if
(47:11):
you wove a certain color through your wool and apron
while you were making it, you could express all sorts
of personal feelings and social status is like a certain
color might indicate marital status. So anyway, when the city
women started wearing underwear, the country, folks, all is something
that only rich women, women in sports and prostitutes might wear.
And also since poor country women didn't get to rest
(47:33):
while they got their period, they would have to work
through it. Meanwhile, I'm down for the account for at
least two days when aunt flow comes along. And don't
even get me started on dealing with pregnancy in the
nineteenth century. Anyway, I love listening to you people talk
about cool things. Keep doing what you're doing, so thanks.
I'll go for that insight into nineteenth century serbian underwear,
(47:57):
and now I kind of wish that I had a
symbolic wool and a brandy. So if you have any
costume history or facts about astronomers or anything else you'd
like to share with us, Mom stuff at house. Stuff
works dot Com is our email address and for links
to all of our social media as well as all
of our blogs, videos, and podcasts, including this one with
all of our sources so you can follow along, head
(48:19):
on over to stuff mom Never Told You dot com
for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is
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