Ellen Stofan Credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky AAS Committee on the Status of Women Issue of April 19, 2024 eds: Jeremy Bailin, Nicolle Zellner, Sethanne Howard, and Hannah Jang-Condell [We hope you all are taking care of yourselves and each other. --eds.] This week's issues: 1. Crosspost: Women at NASA Support Human Spaceflight 2. Global Star Party 3. Making Space for Women in Astronomy 4. Advancing gender equity within STEM fields 5. The Victorian Woman Who Chased Eclipses 6. Hackathon 3 7. Women end up doing the academic housework 8. Survey on financial scarcity and poverty 9. ‘Shrugging off failur ..read more

By Nicolle Zellner On April 12, the United Nations celebrated the International Day of Human Spaceflight in honor of Yuri Gagarin, a Soviet citizen. who conducted the first human space flight. This historic event opened the way for space exploration for the benefit of all humanity. NASA has been the leader of human spaceflight in the United States, and women at all of the NASA centers and facilities have worked - for decades - to support those efforts. Here are just a few of them. Teresa Kinney, NASA's first female chief engineer at the agency's Kennedy Space Center (KSC), is one of the ..read more

Item 2: Annie Maunder AAS Committee on the Status of Women Issue of April 12, 2024 eds: Jeremy Bailin, Nicolle Zellner, Sethanne Howard, and Hannah Jang-Condell [We hope you all are taking care of yourselves and each other. --eds.] This week's issues: 1. Career Profile: Jörg Matthias Determann Records Modern Science History 2. The Victorian Woman Who Chased Eclipses 3. Women end up doing the academic housework 4. Job Opportunities 5. How to Submit to the AASWOMEN newsletter 6. How to Subscribe or Unsubscribe to the AASWOMEN newsletter 7. Access to Past Issues An online version of this newslet ..read more

The AAS Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy has compiled dozens of interviews highlighting the diversity of career trajectories available to astronomers, planetary scientists, etc. The interviews share advice and lessons learned from individuals on those paths. Below is our interview with Jörg Matthias Determann, a professor and historian of science in the Department of Liberal Arts & Sciences at Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar. He holds a doctorate from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, and two master’s degrees from the University ..read more

AAS Committee on the Status of Women Issue of April 5, 2024 eds: Jeremy Bailin, Nicolle Zellner, Sethanne Howard, and Hannah Jang-Condell [We hope you all are taking care of yourselves and each other. --eds.] This week's issues: 1. Sexism in academia wastes public funding and is bad for science  2. Women Eclipse Chasers 3. Meet 5 women pushing the boundaries through NOAA’s work in space 4. Meet the Two Women Leading Space Station Science  5. We asked over 50 women space leaders for words of inspiration. Here's what they told us  6. The State of Girls in STEM: A Conversa ..read more

By Nicolle Zellner In their article for Nature Reviews Materials, Sexism in academia is bad for science and a waste of public funding, Nicole Boivin, Susanne Täuber, Ulrike Beisiegel, Ursula Keller, and Janet Hering write that higher education and research institutions "are critical to the well-being and success of societies, meaning their financial support is strongly in the public interest. At the same time, value-for-money principles demand that such investment delivers. Unfortunately, these principles are currently violated by one of the biggest sources of public funding ineffic ..read more

First Russian cosmonauts who were women AAS Committee on the Status of Women Issue of March 29, 2024 eds: Jeremy Bailin, Nicolle Zellner, Sethanne Howard, and Hannah Jang-Condell [We hope you all are taking care of yourselves and each other. --eds.] This week's issues: 1. Crosspost: How Charlotte Moore Sitterly Wrote The Encyclopedia of Starlight 2. 365 Days of Astronomy podcast for HAD 3. Highlighting the Trailblazing Women of Spaceflight in 2024 4. Gender Diversity in Physics Classes Benefits Men and Women 5. Meet 7 women who broke barriers in the field of astronomy and beyond 6. Emily Roeb ..read more

By Elizabeth Landau, for Smithsonian Magazine Charlotte Moore Sitterly working at her desk at the National Bureau of Standards in Washington, D.C. Image Credit: Michael Duncan via the M.D. Moore Family Charlotte Moore could smell the coal burning in the furnace below her back-room workspace at the Princeton University Observatory. With a meager starting salary of $100 per month, she worked as a “computer” for the famous astronomer Henry Norris Russell, helping with calculations to describe how stars evolve and what kinds of materials burn inside them. Her boss’s mind seeme ..read more

Katherine Johnson, item 2. Credit: Wikimedia Commons AAS Committee on the Status of Women Issue of March 22, 2024 eds: Jeremy Bailin, Nicolle Zellner, Sethanne Howard, and Hannah Jang-Condell [We hope you all are taking care of yourselves and each other. --eds.] This week's issues: 1. Alenush Terian: The the “Mother of Modern Iranian Astronomy” 2. Study finds media coverage focused on NASA mathematician's achievements, but treated discrimination as past problem 3. Margaret Hamilton: the woman who sent humans to the moon 4. What Are Stars Made Of? Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin Discovered It First 5 ..read more

Excerpted from IranWire Alenush Terian at Sorbonne University (Credit: IranWire) She is called the “Mother of Modern Iranian Astronomy” and for good reason: she was a cofounder of the first solar observatory in Iran and the first female professor of physics in the country. Her achievements become much more impressive once we learn that, besides being a woman in a patriarchal society, she also belonged to a religious and ethnic minority. Alenush Terian was born in Tehran on November 9, 1920, to an Armenian family. Her father, Arto Terian, and mother, Varto Terian, were two famous f ..read more