‘Tis the season for recommendation letter writing and a friendly reminder of an important issue that letter writers, readers, and requestors should all be aware of. (Also see last year’s Recommendation Letter Writing Round Up.) While writing letters is a task that is generally taken with great care for all mentees, there are some things that should be kept in mind when writing letters for women. In order to minimize the unconscious bias of the person evaluating applicant, letter writers should be very cautious of gendering their letters. It has been shown that:

…qualities mentioned in recommendation letters for women differ sharply from those for men, and those differences may be costing women jobs and promotions in academia and medicine. Female candidates were described in more communal (social or emotive) terms and male candidates in more agentic (active or assertive) terms.

Words in the communal category [that are gendered and should be avoided, especially for women] included adjectives such as affectionate, helpful, kind, sympathetic, nurturing, tactful and agreeable, and behaviors such as helping others, taking direction well and maintaining relationships.

Agentic adjectives [which should be used for everybody] included words such as confident, aggressive, ambitious, dominant, forceful, independent, daring, outspoken and intellectual, and behaviors such as speaking assertively, influencing others and initiating tasks.

Also checkout FSP’s recent post in Scientopia about whether or not to say anything negative at all, other “Rules,” and a helpful discussion in the comments. I also find inspiration from this compilation of Useful Phrases.

Letter requesters, please share this post with your writers regardless of your or their gender—they’ll appreciate the help and it will help raise the community’s awareness of the ways we can minimize the pesky gender biases that are still negatively impacting our field.

A couple weeks ago, Sean over at Cosmic Variance brought up the topic of “smart” with respect to Steve Jobs and I want to use that post to springboard to a slightly different opinion piece: Astronomy (and Physics) will not be as scientifically productive as it could be and will not make meaningful progress towards equity, diversity, and inclusivity until we change the value system currently in place to assess “smartness.” Building instruments, reducing data, writing code, and the like need to be just as highly valued as doing problem sets and thinking like a theorist. If you can do science, you are smart.

What needs to happen is a complete overhaul for how we asses and reward students who are good at the various things that are crucial for Astronomy to move forward. (Requiring theory-inclined students to take a lab course is not anywhere close to what I’m talking about.) The current hierarchy is bad for Science and bad for scientists. This is a fundamental problem with our field and we need to all be working towards fixing it in whatever ways we can.

What can you do? First and foremost, everyone should be careful with their own language and call out our colleague’s language. In our everyday conversations, formal and informal, we should be very careful about perpetuating the current out-of-wack system.

Second, there are the bigger issues of getting rid of the Physics GRE requirement for admission and changing the qualifying exams for PhD candidacy, especially in joint Physics and Astro departments. But these are tough and need to be dealt with on a department-by-department basis. Although maybe the AAS, in conjunction with the AIP Statistics folks, can make some statement about the lack of correlation between GRE and Qual success and future meaningful contributions to Astro. If you know of some good references for these stats, please post in the comments.

Third, community-wide, the Roman Technology Fellowship program is a huge step in the right direction towards giving instrument builders the early-career support they need and deserve. But this program is decades late. We can’t afford to wait that long to start valuing our astronomers who are coding geniuses. Do you think there should be a fellowship program dedicated to supporting our colleagues who write data-reduction pipelines or other fundamental pieces of code?

What else do you think we can be doing to properly define what it means to be a “smart” Astronomer in our hearts, minds, prizes, admissions criteria, degree-granting requirements, and funding opportunities?

For better or worse, Astronomy has a strong drinking culture. Whether it’s the Friday beer/wine/scotch departmental event, nights out at conferences, or the AAS Party, we drink together a lot. Here’s a nice article on maintaining a balance between having a good time and maintaining a professional demeanor. I especially like the advice to be ready with a good answer to, “What have you been working on recently?” (via Lifehacker)

Navigating the Corporate Happy Hour | We Wear Khakis.

(On a personal note, I’ve been super blog-quiet lately and I miss it everyday. I’m hoping that things will settle down over the next several weeks so that I can resume a more satisfying posting frequency.)

Europe Downscales Monster Telescope to Save Money | ScienceInsider

The world’s biggest telescope is getting smaller—but more affordable. The designers of the future European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) have decided to shrink the telescope’s primary mirror from a diameter of 42 meters to 39.3 meters. The resulting 13% decrease in sensitivity is likely to reduce its scientific payoff. But the 18% savings in its overall cost gives the telescope a better chance to remain on schedule for first light in 2022.

There’s a new blog to add to the list of useful resources for grad students: GradHacker. Recent noteworthy posts have been on hacking your committee meetings, coming to grips with not knowing the answers anymore, and the dual-career job search. While it seems that the authors thus far are mainly in the humanities, the issues discussed are relevant to all grad students.

GradHacker is a collaborative blog and bootcamp program that spans universities and programs. It is written by graduate students from a variety of universities, departments, and stages in their careers and for the entire range of graduate and professional students. We are dedicated to creating a community of grads who can benefit from hearing the stories, tips, and challenges of others who are experiencing the same things. The topics that we will tackle are just as varied as the individuals who are writing them, and while the original idea for this spawned from the goal of teaching other grads about technology to ease their lives and help with networking, we want to expand the idea of ‘hacking’ to all aspects of grad life.

Categories that we address include, but are not limited to discussions of professional tasks, reviews of software/hardware, pedagogical challenges and solutions, wellness related topics, family and personal issues, and productivity.

via ProfHacker.

Wiki: Graduate School

Hashtag: #astroJC
Organizers: @astronomyjc
Blog: Astronomy Journal Club

The general idea is that we meet up on twitter at a prearranged day and time and discuss an interesting piece of astronomy research. This will generally take the form of an academic paper, but we could also include some articles too. Everyone’s welcome to participate, whether you know anything about the topic or not. This is all inspired by the original Twitter Journal Club who are doing the same thing for medical research.

The first paper is “Gamma Rays From The Galactic Center and the WMAP Haze” (Hooper & Linden, 2010) and the discussion will kick off on Thurs, June 16.

via SarahAskew .

I’m turning into an interactive lecture evangelist. I’m not the best advocate since I was raised in the faith, rather than converting, but I’ve still been seriously trying to convince my physics colleagues and the adjuncts who teach our evening and summer Astro101 to add just at least a bit of student-centered learning to each of their lectures.

I was excited to see this article on Improving the Science of Teaching Science in the NY Times this morning, but then I read it. The piece basically takes apart a relatively small study trying to quantify the results of interactive lecture, or “deliberate practice” that are described in a ScienceNOW article: A Better Way to Teach?.

The “deliberate practice” method begins with the instructor giving students a multiple-choice question on a particular concept, which the students discuss in small groups before answering electronically. Their answers reveal their grasp of (or misconceptions about) the topic, which the instructor deals with in a short class discussion before repeating the process with the next concept.

The NY Times article, by what appears to be a psychology-focused writer, basically has a psychologist identify all the holes in the experimental design and concludes,

Recovering from End-of-the-Semester Burnout | acadmiblog

Great advice here for recovering from a busy semester but also applicable for post thesis defense, coming off the job market, or finishing a big project. My favorite nugget is about making realistic goals for the summer:

Think through what your top priorities are for the summer, making sure these are realistic and doable…Be aware that if your goals for the summer are overly ambitious, you risk feeling like a failure for not completing them come the Fall or exacerbating your exhaustion by trying to take on too much.

It’s true – there are too few women presenting science on TV | Kim Shillinglaw | Science | guardian.co.uk

The BBC is putting forth an effort to have more women scientist.

But – as someone who’s been making science programmes for a long time – I’ve got to confess that there could be another reason: perhaps we programme makers just haven’t tried hard enough…

The increase in younger scientists, both male and female, who are decent communicators – not just in labs and lecture halls, but blogging, tweeting, even doing comedy tours – is a big plus for us. There are more women climbing the ladder: around a third of Stem researchers and a quarter of lecturers are female. However lame the record to date, science is (slowly) changing.

Science on TV has to move with this trend, and as we get better at developing women presenters and interviewees, maybe TV can even encourage a bit of change itself. I welcome and look forward to your thoughts.

It’s true – there are too few women presenting science on TV | Kim Shillinglaw | Science | guardian.co.uk.

I’ve linked to a couple things from astrobites recently and added them to our blogroll a couple days ago. It’s a blog run by astro grad students intended for astro-curious undergrads. (But I enjoy reading it as well!) Here’s their announcement from the AAS Newsletter.

ASTROBITES: LITERATURE JOURNAL AND WEBLOG FOR UNDERGRADUATES

Do you know undergraduate students beginning research in astronomy? Point them to Astrobites, a new daily astrophysical literature journal and weblog.

Each day, Astrobites, written by graduate students at Harvard University and the University of Michigan, distills one interesting astro-ph paper into a brief format at a level accessible to undergraduate students in the physical sciences. Our goal is to develop a gateway to the astrophysical research community suitable for an undergraduate starting in research, complete with simple explanations and links to introductory level resources designed to familiarize students with the field of astrophysics. Readers will learn about the latest research, major questions motivating the field, observational and theoretical techniques, and what it’s like to observe at a large telescope or attend an AAS meeting.

Recent posts that caught my eye

• Databases of Astronomy
• The Hubble Effect: How to Advance Astronomy by Working for Free

Check them out at http://astroph.wordpress.com/ and spread the word!