Studying Gender in Astronomy Conferences: #NAM2014 Edition!

Folks: A quick shout out for some data gathering to help with...

I should have posted this earlier, but if you are at NAM (National Astronomy Meeting) 2014 in Portsmouth this week, please help collect data for their gender study!

More details here!




This is of course based directly on the gender in astronomy talks study I conducted last winter, and I'm very excited that people have taken an interest both in the US and abroad. After the two days of data gathering, #NAM2014 has racked up some nice statistics of talks for their study. The UK data will be very interesting to compare with the US data from AAS223 last January.

In other Gender-in-astro-conference news:

  • We gathered data for a large number of the talks at Cool Stars 18 in Flagstaff, AZ a couple weeks ago (June 2014)
  • I am involved in conducting larger follow-up study with AAS for the upcoming AAS225 meeting in Seattle (Jan 2015)

All this is to say: we (the professional astronomy community) is gathering lots of data about ourselves on how speakers and questioners interact. There is a divide, a disconnect between the improving gender balance in astronomy and the distribution of people who speak up at meetings. We need to document this, to understand it. This will lead to (I hope) insight of how to conduct meetings to be as fair/open/balanced for everyone as possible! 

If you're running a meeting and want to collect data like this, don't hesitate to reach out! Remember my motto: 
"Scientist, study thyself"

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