New Study Looks Into Hubble Telescope Gender Bias

September 25, 2014

Image Caption: The Space Shuttle Atlantis moves away from Hubble after the telescopes release on May 19, 2009 concluded Servicing Mission 4. The Soft Capture Mechanism, a ring that a future robotic mission can grapple in order to de-orbit the telescope, is visible in the center. Credit: NASA

April Flowers for redOrbit.com Your Universe Online

Out of every four proposals submitted to gain observation time on the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), three are denied. You might think that these denials are based strictly on the merits of the study being proposed and the current viewing patterns of the telescope, but you would be wrong.

A new internal study from the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), published online currently on arXiv and coming soon to an issue of Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, reveals that gender plays a subtle, but distinct role in proposal acceptance as well. As Clara Moskowitz of Scientific American reports, in each of the last 11 proposal cycles, having a male principle investigator on the proposal made it more likely to be accepted.

Its fascinating and disturbing, Yale University astronomer Dr. Meg Urry, who formerly led the Hubble proposal review committee for several years, told Moskowitz. Urry, who feels frustrated that some of the results were during her tenure, continued, I made a lot of efforts to have women on the review committees, and during the review I spent time listening to the deliberations of each panel. I never heard anything that struck me as discriminationand my antennae are definitely tuned for such thingsso its clear the bias is very subtle, and that both men and women are biased.

First of all, HST proposals are written by teams of both men and women, each of whom contributes to the proposal and ensures its a good one, she told David Freeman of the Huffington Post. So the PI alone doesnt have that much impact on the quality of the proposal. More importantly, biases against women in STEM and other male-dominated professions have been seen in hundreds, perhaps thousands of social science experiments. So it would be very unusual if somehow astronomers were immune to the biases shared broadly by men and women in the U.S.

STScI, which administrates the HST program, initiated the study about two years ago. The research team manually reviewed all of the proposals for the last 11 cycles and then categorized them by principal investigators gender. They found that applications submitted by men fared better than those submitted by women in every cycle.

It isnt a large difference, maybe four or five fewer proposals from women selected each cycle than statistics say should be chosen based on the number of proposals submitted. You can kind of explain it away as just sampling statistics in any given cycle, but it happens every year, Neill Reid, an STScI astronomer who oversees time allocation for Hubble, told Moskowitz. It is a systematic effect. The researchers found that effect is stronger for older principal investigators (PIs); among recent graduates, the success rates for men and women are closer to equal. I could speculate whether the proposals are being written in a different way or whether the younger astronomers are more visible because theyre giving more talks. Maybe it has something to do with the institutions theyre at, Reid said.

The STScI team has no data concerning the cause or causes of the gender imbalance, so they plan to re-analyze the data to find contributing factors before consulting with social scientists who research bias to develop strategies to fight this trend.

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New Study Looks Into Hubble Telescope Gender Bias