60% of young astronomers are women

Maybe it's time I changed professions...

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That is good news.

At my local society I am the only young woman. It seems to have caused some consternation amongst the more elderly members who seem to think my husband drags me along - bless 'em .

Yay! this is good....too bad i am not in astronomy....But i bet my girlfriend would be mad if i went into it for the girls. :-)

I'm in the wrong field. Seems like 98% of every non-humanities class I'm in is male.

Excellent news, though. Gender gap? What gender gap?

Darn, so my generation ran off all the star-ladies?

Nah ... I'll bet that among astronomers born before 1975, an even lower percentage are women. Women have traditionally been discouraged from going into "geeky" science fields.

Correction...Women have traditionally been discouraged from going out with Geeks. :-)

That's good news for the 40% of young astronomers that are men.

For the 100% of us decrepit old farts that are old enough to be their fathers, it does us no good at all...

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Charlie in Dayton, A.AsC.

<< Young guy, yeah, you'd think I was lucky. But that is before I start talking about propelling things with only small nuclear bombs. Then they start to scatter. :wink: -Colt

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Be not afraid of any man no matter what his size; when danger threatens, call on me, and I will equalize.

Perhaps some of them are in need of a wise and experienced mentor....

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Daryl Hannah as Roxanne Kowalski in Roxanne (1987), Jodi Foster as Dr. Eleanor Ann 'Ellie' Arroway in Contact (1997), Mandy Moore as Jamie Sullivan in A Walk To Remember (2002). Weren't there some in the seventies too?

All of the females in my Astronomy class at school seemed to be in there just for the science credit. :-? So far I've not met a girl which is interested in Astronomy and Space Technology as much as I am.. Of course I am a bit fanatical about it. :P -Colt

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Be not afraid of any man no matter what his size; when danger threatens, call on me, and I will equalize.

Tisk, tisk, tisk. The field to go into to pick up (smart) girls is education. MY girlfriend is in elementry ed. and she has only one (1) guy in all of her classes combined!

I have got to say Astronomy girls are all starry eyed, but teachers are just top of the line. :-)

I what I find truely amazing is the enormous over-representation women have had in the field.

Given science was discouraged as a vocation for women - no matter where you turn through the history of astronomy, you bump into a woman's name.

I recall reading during the early days of variable star study - one observatory had an all female staff, the only male was the director Pickering (?). And if memory serves me further - these ladies helped produce the Henry Draper catalogue and devised our current scheme of identifying stella spectra.

Not bad for a male dominated field?

Glen - leave me alone, I got four daughters.

I would certainly have to agree! My girlfriend is a teacher as well. I have to resort looking for dates in the Education building, as in Engineering the six women in my classes for the past 4 years know me too well to date me. :wink:

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...what's so wrong with a little overkill?

At last, the universe is achieving equilibrium I have to mention that my daughter is in engineering and my younger son is in education. Each reports an abundant number of the opposite sex. Smart kids.

Pickering hired a bunch of women to do the work because it was tedious stuff that the men didn't want to do, and also because he didn't have to pay them nearly as much. Two of the women were Annie Jump Cannon, who devised the stellar classification system (though probably not the usual mnemonic: "Oh, Be A Fine Girl...") and Henrietta Leavitt, who discovered the Cepheid variables.

More info (but brief)

Even more info (and photos)

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Maybe you could offer to help them with their homework. (Wink wink, nudge nudge)

Reminds me of the stories I heard about the computing department in Los Alamos before they had electronic calculators...

Alas, it is Summer Vacation for me and I don't think I can take Astronomy over. And like I said, most of them found me a bit odd. Most of the time I just drew in that class. :P -Colt

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Be not afraid of any man no matter what his size; when danger threatens, call on me, and I will equalize.

Hey, let's ask the Bad if it's true---he gets around, right?
...and do astrobiologists count?

Oh well, and here I was thinking since I already study one male-dominated domain, I could also go into astronomy... seems the competition will be harder there :P

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"Half of what I say is meaningless, but I say it so that the other half may reach you."

But if you want to meet girls, you have to go pro: Only 9% of amateur astronomers are female (but that's still a 50% increase over the last 20 years or so).

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

Sadly, there is still a leaky pipeline at work in the field. Larger numbers of female grad students have not led to larger numbers of women professors/scientists. They seem to fall out somewhere and leave the field. This disturbing trend is well-documented.

I was in the only female in my class in grad school. And I dropped out (for various reasons, though, none of which relate to being a girl, :wink. I still work in the field, though, with my masters that screams "failed PhD." 8)

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Be cunning and full of tricks and your people shall never be destroyed.

--Richard Adams, "Watership Down"

No females in my field... or maybe there are, but it's difficult to tell.

ysandre is female. Never knew, probably because the name reminded me of The Andre.

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"...bartenders and shiny stuff and dreams are made of stooped necromancers he seems like a banana wrist having strayed too close to the constellations on their shaved skulls. The rain of frogs ended and a rain of blood comes down. "

It's derivative of Isolde (as in, Tristan and...). From Jacqueline Carey's Kushiel trilogy.

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Be cunning and full of tricks and your people shall never be destroyed.

--Richard Adams, "Watership Down"

Thought you were a 7 feet tall 300 pounds wrestler... sorry

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"...bartenders and shiny stuff and dreams are made of stooped necromancers he seems like a banana wrist having strayed too close to the constellations on their shaved skulls. The rain of frogs ended and a rain of blood comes down. "

Ah, but how do you know none of the reasons you dropped out were due to your feminine-ness? (Your womanitude? Your girlic quotient?) Maybe the seemingly-gender-neutral reasons you dropped out were actually, secretly, reasons experienced more often by women than by men!

Failed PhD? How about overachieving undergrad? I suggest, ysandre, if at all possible, give it another try. A long time ago, in a galaxy 3.130e-13 parsecs away, I didn't do so good in math and science. They say that those who can, do; those who can't, teach; and those who can't even teach, become lawyers. But y'know, I missed astro-stuff, so I started back last year with freshman material at the same university. I'm doing much better now, except for the very latest class I had--NEVER take differential equations from a professor with a dual appointment in the economics department!--and if I keep on plugging part-time for another 12 years, maybe I will get to be an astrophysicist when I grow up. Even if not, it's great fun just trying. I am fortunate to have a solo practice with some flexibility in hours, and maybe I sort of arranged things that way on purpose instead of being a relatively well-paid, but powerless, associate in a firm.

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"You're only young once, but you can always be immature." -- Dave Barry

Not enough discipline, drive, ambition, whatever you want to call it...(or maybe just not smart enough, my grades sucked). Also bombed my qualifier cause I was in a major car accident and my dad had a stroke on the same day; not in the mood to study that summer. (And just gave away my identity to anyone who knows me... ) Is this girly stuff? No marriage/two body problem or harassment reasons.

I try not to wallow in self-pity TOO much about this stuff... :wink:

Sweet. I think I might go into computer science now, though (Oh, the horror! )

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Be cunning and full of tricks and your people shall never be destroyed.

--Richard Adams, "Watership Down"