Gender in Astro Talks, Video

At the upcoming AAS 231 meeting in Washington DC I will once again be running my "Gender in Astronomy Survey" project (background here). This will be the 5th year for gathering data at the winter AAS meetings, and we'll returning to the site where the gender survey first was conducted!

Exciting!

Here's a short video I put together last week about our gender demographics survey, the recent paper by Sarah Schmidt and myself about the 4-years of data we have in hand so far, and some recent findings/suggestions from similar work in other scientific fields!




Give it a watch, and let me know if you'd like to help or have suggestions on the project!

Gender of White House Visitors

Last summer, as as part of my internship working with these awesome people at MSR,  I spent a lot of time playing with public data sources. One fascinating dataset that I chose as a benchmark (for what is currently known as Tempe at MSR) is the White House Visitor records, which (as of last July) had over 3 Million records of visitors to the White House during the Obama administration.

This dataset has been in the news before, and is (in my opinion) a great example of public disclosure that we should be pushing for in government. A whole other conversation of course is how/when such records should be released, and by whom. The White House Visitor dataset is also known to be incomplete, censoring records for national or personal security reasons, and maybe other reasons too.

Here is just one question I came up with: Do more men or women visit the White House? My guess was that a majority of visitors would be men.

How we Perceive Racial Demographics

Last year I conducted a short online survey to (attempt to) answer a simple question:
How accurately do people know the racial demographics of their neighborhood?

This was prompted by overhearing a great many generalizations about the racial composition of Seattle, and the UW in particular. The survey was straight forward: simply provide your guesses for the % of each race in your neighborhood, as well as a few details about yourself (age, gender, race, and most importantly ZIP code in the USA). The ZIP code was used to compare the user-estimated %'s to data from the US 2010 census.

I'd like to share a bit of what I learned...

1. Respondents, or, The Kindness of Strangers

Race in US Colleges

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The Chronicle posted a nice spreadsheet containing race, ethnicity, and gender data from ~4300 institutions of higher education across America. (Note: the article and data file are now behind a paywall, which was not in effect when I downloaded the data set)

It's a really intriguing data set, and I thought it was worth a few minutes of my time to play with it. My results are amusing, but I don't think I've fully captured the rich potential this data has to offer serious researchers.

My first question was simple: what does the most basic racial composition of US Colleges look like?

Voting: Do Small Counties Matter?

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With the Aug 7th primary voting already fading to a distant memory, it occurred to me that I never bothered to look at the results! Between the Summer Olympics, fabulous recent weather in Seattle, King Felix's coronation, and signs from God, I can hardly be blamed for this minor oversight.

Getting "out" the vote has been a major movement for most of my life it seems. Who can forget "Vote or Die", which I still consider to be the most benevolent of any voter sign-up organization. The stench of partisan agenda is never far from such campaigns....

I grew up on the Eastern side of Washington State, and have spent most of the last decade on the Western side. Party lines are drawn through our state as if by Creation itself. Even "Seattle conservatives" believe the East siders live in an intellectual rain shadow.

Of course, the primary results yielded almost nothing surprising. Since they provided nothing witty nor urbane to be overheard discussing about, I intended to promptly forget about them. That is... until I realized there was interesting data on the results webpage: voter turnout statistics. Jackpot.

The Lazy Metropolis

It has been reported that voter turnout flirted with record low levels this year. Let's take a look...

Washington State historic voter turnout percentages for
gubernatorial races, with 2012 shown in blue.

This history of diminishing turnout is fascinating to me. What could it mean? A population that is steadily becoming lazier? Or perhaps more disenfranchised and disconnected from the political system? It's difficult to say - indeed I can scarcely think of a rigorous way to test such sentiments. Figures such as this certainly tell a strong story though, and give cause to wonder: will voter turnout continue to linearly decline? Will we reach a point of negligible participation in our own governance? (In so much as voting qualifies as participation. Whether the entire machine has been taken over by the bipartisan corporate-backed military industrial complex... or aliens... is an exercise for the reader) 

Looking in detail at the voter turnout for just this year's primary may give another clue to the nature of such low numbers.

Washington State Primary 2012 voter turnout for all 39 counties,
as a function of the number of registered voters per county.

Another intriguing (somewhat weak) trend is found when looking at the 2012 Primary turnout for each county: more populous counties tend to have lower turnout! This is especially fascinating, indicating to me that the more metropolitan people can't be bothered as much to vote. In other words, Urbanization may negatively affect voter turnout.

The story might be that over time people move in to cities (Seattle, Spokane, Tacoma, etc), and as they do they lose incentive to vote. Again, whether this is due increased laziness towards politics seems difficult to prove with testable predictions. Considerably more data exists for WA, and it would seem beneficial to conduct such a study in order to reverse this trend.

And with an increasing percentage of people living in cities, we do need to reverse it. If such a model for decreasing voter participation is true, we must learn why.

Little Fish

Along the lines of urbanization discussed above, it is worth considering the impact that the more dutiful counties are having. This question results in my stupid title: Do Small Counties Matter?

Here we have the cumulative distribution of registered voters in WA. The way to read this is that we have sorted each county by the number of voters (left to right), and then added them up one by one. The incredible result is that the four largest counties (Spokane, Snohomish, Pierce, and King) contain more than 50% of the registered voters! (actually 58.9%) Urbanization in Action!

This also means, naturally, they have the majority of the voters. But, didn't we just see that the rural counties had higher turnout? Well, yes. Unfortunately it's almost insignificant...

As you can see, the cumulative distribution of actual votes in the 2012 Primary is nearly the same as the distribution of the voters. Nearly - but not quite the same. The proud sense of civic duty earned the 35 other counties 1.1% more of the total votes.

So, it would seem something worth talking about did come from looking at the election results! Vote or Die: participation is not the worst of evils.

Racial Perceptions - A First Glance

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Last night I had a few hours to kill at a cafe. The cafe had decent coffee, and slow wifi, so I thought it would be a good chance to mess around with the preliminary results from my race perceptions survey! I am intending to dress this up quite a bit when I get more respondents (the survey will remain open for now).

For now, here is a first "quick and dirty" look at how our perceptions of racial composition track with reality.

Map of Respondents

Here is the updated map, with ~380 people responding across the country. There is major clustering around certain major cities, owing to my sending the survey to my Facebook friends (largely in WA), and two region-specific subreddits (r/seattle and r/sanfrancisco). The sample of respondents is ~80% white, 55% male, and 90% are within the 18-25 or 25-35 age groups.

In red: density of zip codes across the US. Survey respondents are marked in blue.