Women Scientists

Great list already, and could (as you say) easily be extended.

Anneila Sargent has also become, recently, Caltech's head of the Student Affairs Office.

Coincidently, both she and my wife earned degrees from Edinburgh University, did research for years in Australia, and became Physics professors.

Naming Sandy is cheating, you use to be at UCSC.

But, yea, this pretty easy. Astro has gotten a bit better. I can name 5 without leaving the UC system but excluding my home institution.

I used to be at Caltech also.

Ok: Chung Pei Ma, and Andrea Ghez - going for nearby institutions for minimum effort.

As Brad points out, Astro has gotten a bit better, and so naming 5 female astronomers is pretty easy.

If you want to make this a bit more challenging, and point out a glaring problem in our field, name 5 African-American astronomers. "Neil Tyson" is too easy -- make it 5 other than Neil.

I can name at least 5 african-american astronomers, but the numbers are small enough that making a list feels less like celebrating how far we've come, than like focusing even more attention on the few people who are probably called upon to be Model Minorities way too often for comfort. Sometimes you just want to be a scientist, and not a Group X Scientist. For astronomy, women are now a dime a dozen, and I think most of us are past feeling like we stick out, or that we have to be representative of All Women Scientists. Thus, shouting out names is not a big whoop. However, we're totally not there as a field in recruitment and retention of minorities. Hopefully, in 10 years it will be as trivial to name african-american astronomers as it is now to name female astronomers.

Re: African American and other minority students--I think this is a really tough topic that no one in astronomy really talks about. What are people doing to recruit minorities into Astronomy? I have literally gone years without bumping into an American astronomer with a skin tone darker than Italian ancestry, so I want this to change.

I think this issue is one that many astroblogs should draw attention to, especially in suggesting ways that everyone can work toward changing.

My first suggestion would be to have as many astronomers visit historically black colleges and minority focus engineering groups on campuses to promote our field...

A bunch of UW's astro grad students started this program:

http://www.astro.washington.edu/premap/

to work on the pipeline problem for minorities, first-generation college students, and women. The program is being replicated in several departments across the campus.

The students involved just got an award from the National Society of Black Physicists. We also send students or faculty to every national meeting of the NSBP to forge connections. UW's minority population tends to be primarily pacific-rim, due to our location, so african american participation is low, due to the demographics of the feeder pool. Still, it's small steps that will hopefully pay off.

Other programs I know of: University of Wisconsin does some impressive outreach for it's REU program, and Keivan Stassun at Vanderbilt has started a superb "bridge" program in partnership with Fisk.

Well, I started to, but was brought up short by two issues: one is that "african-american" is a very US-centric concept - or to cast it in contemporary light, is Obama "african-american"?
Or, is he "just african"?
Or, is he neither?

I don't want to get into a blog debate on "what is race", and the reality is that for many younger people it doesn't matter, people are a mix.
Much less do I want to get into the distinction between people descended culturally from africans who spent time in the US as slaves, as opposed to people descended from dark skinned sub-Saharan people who were not slaves in the US specifically.
An argument can be made that the cultural perspective and impact are different, and an argument can be made that the key issue is the current cultural bias and difference in expectations based on superficialities.
Either way I don't want to go any further in that direction.

JohnD -- have you seen Keivan Stassun's (prof at Vanderbilt) talk on increasing the number of minorities in physics and astronomy? Recruiting at HBCUs is one of the things he strongly suggests. He also mentions that many minority students who eventually get a PhD in science get a master's degree first, so looking for non-traditional students (i.e. not just fresh-faced 22-year-olds straight out of undergrad) will also help.

Steinn--fair enough. The reality for a lot of colleges in the US are a bunch of groups aligned along different perceived racial/ethnic groups (e.g. Black Engineers, Philipino Student's Association)--at least it was when I was an undergrad. My goals aren't to figure out what everyone's race is, but to make my profession a little less lilly white male. If I wanted that, I could just look in a mirror all day. Science really benefits from people who come at problems from all different directions and backgrounds.

Julianne and Becky: thanks for the great pointers, I will definitely check them out.

Just to clarify - I think the discussion of minorities in science and astro in particular is helpful and interesting, and I am very interested to hear about the efforts to expand participation and retention.

What I personally do not want to do is to try to list astronomers by ethnic identity, as was my reflex intent when hos mentioned it - partly because I don't know that people of heterogenous ancestry would appreciate me sticking a label on them, and partly because I am European and really do not have the cultural sensitivity to navigate some of these issues in the US - not that there aren't race issues in Europe, but they have different context and some subtle distinctions I don't want to get into right here and now.
ie I don't want to put my foot in it.

I amazed that JD can name 5 black astronomers. I think that I can name 3, and one is Neil Tyson....

I actually know more Mexican astronomers than Black Americans, though all of those grew up in Mexico, not in the US (which may or may not say something important). Along the later lines, SACNAS tries to do outreach to encourage and develop Chicano and Native American students in the sciences. They would be another organization for people to look into if they are interested.

http://www.math.buffalo.edu/mad/physics/astronomy-peeps.html

they are definitely missing some younger astronomers, depending on your definition

Thank Steinn. I saw Barbara Williams give a nice talk once at a AAS meeting on radio observations of compact groups. I was struck by the work she was doing with van Gorkom on dynamics. Back then, I did not take copious notes, and so completely forgot her name or what her targets were.

Another example of the type of outreach that is needed is the UCSC Center for Adaptive Optics summer programs and internships (California and esp. Hawaii) which have a component of recruiting students from under-represented groups. http://cfao.ucolick.org/EO/ This is part of their mission as an NSF center; from what I understand there are some good success stories.

As always with this problem, it's not that you shouldn't think about it at the faculty-hiring level, but that's really thinking about it way too late. Unfortunately, universities usually aren't very well set up to intervene at earlier stages of the science-education pathway, or more precisely, some dedicated person has to go out of their way to set it up.

I'm excited about all of this discussion. I initiated the meme and I'm glad I did. It's really got people (especially scientists) talking about our past and present diversity issues. I really like that you all initiated a discussion about pipeline issues and diversity. I am an African-American grad student (PhD abd) in life sciences. One of my other meme ideas was naming scientists from different ethnic groups...define ethnic group...I know what a tangle...but I'm glad to see people spontaneously naming female, black, and latino scientists in your field.

Thanks for educating me.

Thanks for participating in the Science Diversity Meme - Women in Science. I've summarized the Meme and catalogued many of the submitted names. Visit the Women in Science Summary at my blog.