Unconscious Bias

I’m blogging from the American Astronomical Society meeting in Austin, TX!  Today I attended a great series of talks all falling under the umbrella of increasing diversity in astronomy (particularly in universities).  One talk, given by Caroline Simpson, addressed the issue of unconscious bias in hiring.  She cited a lot of really interesting research, which I’ll blog about later, but first I’d like to give an introduction to unconscious bias.

First things first: I need to introduce the concept of a schema.  A schema is basically a structure we use to help ourselves organize knowledge.  In this context, it can be thought of as a broad assumption (or group of assumptions) about a group of people.  An example of something that used to be more of a schema than it is today is that mothers do not work.  A schema that still exists is that scientists are male.

Schemas can be mismatched.  A female scientist with children is an example of a mismatching schemas – it is in conflict with with the schema that scientists are male, and also with the (slightly outdated) schema that mothers don’t work.

Unconscious bias occurs when schemas are mismatched.  In hiring, unconscious bias can occur when a candidate’s schema does not match the schema of the outcome.  If a woman is interviewing for a research scientist position, her schema does not match that of the hired research scientist (who would typically be male).  The person in the position to hire may form invalid opinions about the candidate based on their schema, which may result in a negative hiring decision.

Unconscious bias sounds really similar to overt discrimination (forming untrue, negative opinions about others based on their sex/gender/race/etc).  But it differs from overt discrimination in that a person may not even be aware that they are biased against a certain group (or groups).  Unconscious bias is very subtle, which is why it is so important to be aware of it.  Making others aware that unconscious bias exists is the first step towards eliminating it!

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin

Cecilia Payne was born in England in 1900.  While attending Newham College at Cambridge University, Cecilia became interested in astronomy.  She studied physics at Cambridge, but was not awarded a degree, because Cambridge did not offer degrees to women at the time.  She received a fellowship to do research at the Harvard Observatory under the direction of Harlow Shapley, the director of the Harvard Observatory.  She started there in 1923.

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin

She received her PhD in astronomy from Radcliffe College, and became the first person (male or female) to receive a PhD in astronomy from Radcliffe.  Her dissertation is extremely highly regarded, and thought by some to be the most brilliant astronomy PhD thesis ever written.  Her dissertation was entitled “Stellar Atmospheres, A Contribution to the Observational Study of High Temperature in the Reversing Layers of Stars”, and it argued that the variations observed in the spectral absorption lines of stars are due to temperature, not due to different stellar compositions.  She also (correctly) suggested that stars were composed mainly of hydrogen.  The fact that we can determine the temperature of a star based on it’s spectrum is absolutely integral to astronomy.  However, many doubted Cecilia’s results because they thought that all astronomical bodies had the same relative amounts of elements.  In her thesis, deferring to those more highly regarded, she wrote that her results were almost certainly incorrect.  But within a few years, most astronomers accepted that hydrogen was more abundant in the sun than on earth.

After completing her thesis work, she was hired by Harvard to continue work in the Harvard Observatory.  In 1926, at age 26, she became the youngest person to ever be featured in American Men of Science.  She married Russian astronomer Sergei Gaposchkin in 1934.  Cecilia collaborated with Sergei in studying all variable stars brighter than 10th magnitude.  These results were published in 1938 in Variable Stars, which became a standard reference in the field.  However, Cecilia’s work was unrecognized and unappreciated at Harvard.  She taught courses, but until 1945, none of them were listed in the Harvard course catalog.  When Harlow Shapley was replaced by Donald Menzel as the director of the Harvard Observatory, Cecilia was given a raise, promoted to professor, and named the chair of the astronomy department.  She was the first woman at Harvard to hold a position that was not specifically for a woman.

Until her death in 1979, Cecilia wrote over 150 papers and published four books on stars and stellar evolution.  In 1934, she received the Annie Jump Cannon prize from the American Astronomical Society.  She received honorary doctorates from many colleges, and, in 1976, became the first woman to be granted the American Astronomical Society’s Henry Norris Russell Prize.

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin helped pave the way for women who came after her.  Women were rarely involved in the sciences in her time, and especially not women with children.  But Cecilia had three children and continued to do her research.  She once shocked superiors by giving a lecture while she was five months pregnant.  Her legacy lives on through her magnificent contributions to astronomy.

Sources: 1/2/3/4

How to give effective oral presentations

While I was at AAS, I attended a professional development workshop about giving effective oral presentations.  The instructor was Jean-luc Doumont, author of the book Trees, Maps and Theorems: Effective Communication for Rational Minds, and an engineer who has a PhD in applied physics from Stanford.  He went over how to structure your talks, how to get your message across, how to construct a good powerpoint, how to build confidence, and how to answer difficult questions.  Giving effective oral presentations is something that many people, including myself, struggle with.  I wanted to share some of the tips he gave; I found them extremely useful, and I am actually excited to give an oral presentation so I can put these tips into action!

The “What” vs. the “So What”: Doumont stressed the idea of getting across your message.  He differentiated the message from the information.  The information can be thought of as the “what”.  The message is therefore the “so what”.  One of the most useful things he said was to “maximize what the audience gets out of the presentation, not the information you put it.”  I think it can be really tempting to put as much information into your presentation as possible, but it is more effective to parse out unnecessary information and concentrate on the “so what”, the motivation for your work.  Your talks should always have a message.

The three rules of communication:

1. Adapt to the audience: You need to be aware of who your audience is.  Understand who you are addressing – is it a group of people in your field or a group outside your field?
2. Maximize the “signal to noise” ratio:  You want to maximize your message and get rid of noise.  Noise can be things like fidgeting, cluttered powerpoints, too many “likes” or “ums”, or unnecessary graphics.
3. Use effective redundancy (verbal and nonverbal):  Don’t be afraid to make the same point a few times.  In all likelihood, this will drive the point home, and not seem unnecessarily repetitive.  Use both verbal and nonverbal methods to drive home your main message.  Nonverbal methods includes writing it on your powerpoint, showing graphs, etc.

Steps to constructing a presentation:

1. Planning: Gather your thoughts.  Ask yourself the following questions.  Why – What is the purpose of my presentation? Who – Who is my audience? When/Where - What are my time/space constraints? What – What did I do/What is the content of my presentation?
2. Designing: Define the structure of your presentation.  Start with an attention getter, i.e. something funny but relevant, an anecdote, picture, question.  Tell the audience the motivation for your work up front.  If they recognize the importance/the need for your work, they’ll be more likely to pay attention.  Tell the audience what you did to address this need.  Then put in the main message, the one sentence you want your audience to remember.  This way, they will be aware of what they should be getting out of the presentation and will keep it in mind throughout your powerpoint.
3. Creating your slides: Make slides for the audience, not for yourself.  Only put one message per slide.  A bad slide is worse than no slides; if it is a last minute presentation, forget the slides.  Show stand alone slides, so that someone deaf could get the point.  At the same time, speak a stand alone text, so that someone blind could get the point.  Rehearse everything without slides.  Make sure that you include the message for slides with graphs (i.e. why is this graph important?).  Be concise.
4. Delivery: Master all channels – verbal, vocal, and visual.  Memorize the outline, but not the wording.  Verbal - Eradicate filler words, and learn to value silences.  Don’t be afraid to pause to gather your thoughts.  Vocal - Adjust your tone, rate, and volume.  Modulate to convey meaning, complexity, and importance.  Visual – Project confidence by controlling your body.  Ensure presence through strong eye contact.
5. Questions: When taking questions, do not rush.  Listen, repeat/rephrase, think, then answer.  Be honest – if you don’t know the answer, say so.  Also be helpful – tell them you will try to find the answer.  If you get an aggressive question, take a pause to quiet the atmosphere.  Then acknowledge their concern, but disagree with the opinion at the intellectual level.

Nervousness:  Accept nervousness as a good thing!  The adrenaline rush can actually make for a better presentation, since you are more aware.  Nervousness comes from a fear of the unknown, so try to eliminate as many unknowns as possible.  Make a connection with someone in the audience.  Familiarize yourself with the room before presenting.  Focus during the presentation – pace yourself, and breathe slowly.  Finally, have a positive attitude, and visualize yourself succeeding!

I hope you guys find these tips as useful as I did!  There are some online references on Jean-luc Doumont’s website, including webcasts, videos, slides, and handouts.

AAS 217 Highlights

I’ve spent the better part of this week in Seattle at the American Astronomical Society Conference in Seattle, so I decided to write a post about some of the highlights.

I got to attend lots of great talks at the meeting.  Here are some summaries:

• “Cassini Eyes the Rings of Saturn“, a talk given by Carolyn Porco, discussed some recent discoveries by the Cassini spacecraft, which is orbiting Saturn.  Little moons embedded in Saturn’s rings can actually clear spaces in the rings (360-degree gaps or partial gaps).  This is the first time moons have been tracked while inside disks.  It is believed that ~100 large bodies are currently in orbit inside Saturn’s A ring.
• “Chandra’s First Decade of Discovery”, given by Harvey Tananbaum, talked about some important findings made by the space based Chandra X-Ray Observatory since it started operating.
• The session “Super Earths and Terrestrial Planets” contained several mini talks about recent discoveries by the Kepler space-based telescope.  In a talk given by William Borucki, it was announced that Kepler has recently discovered its first confirmed rocky planet! The planet, Kepler-10b, has a radius 1.42 times that of Earth, and has a temperature of 1833 K.
  

  Panel about Kepler-10b from the Kepler booth at AAS

• “The First Supermassive Black Holes”, given by Mitchell Begelman, was dedicated to discussing two different schools of thought about supermassive black hole formation.  One theory is that they formed from Population III stars.  The alternate theory discussed was that they formed from the direct collapse of gas clouds.
• My favorite talk was “New Science with Old Stars” given by Anna Frebel, this year’s recipient of the Annie Jump Cannon Award.  Anna Frebel does high resolution spectroscopy, and she has discovered the oldest known star, and the most metal-poor star.  She researches these extremely old stars to try to answer questions about the formation of our galaxy.  Metal poor stars, having formed before the universe was significantly enriched with metals by supernovae, can help us put together the history of our galaxy’s formation and aid us in understanding the origin and evolution of chemical elements.  The metallicity of a star is defined as its iron to hydrogen ratio.  The most metal poor star has an iron to hydrogen ratio that is 1/250,000 that of the sun.  The oldest known star is dated at around 13 billion years.

While in Seattle, I also got to do some sightseeing, which was exciting since I’ve never been there.  My friends and I went up to the top of the Space Needle, but it was so windy that we couldn’t stay out very long.  We could even feel the building swaying back and forth.  Apparently it sways about an inch for every 10 mph of wind.

The Space Needle

The poster sessions where people display their work on posters are also a lot of fun to go to.  Various organizations, telescopes, and companies have booths at the poster sessions, and some are pretty elaborate.  They also give away wall posters, pens, pamphlets, and things like that, so now I can cover my wall with posters of galaxies and stars.  Overall, I had a great time in Seattle; I learned a lot and got to see a lot of great talks and posters.  I can’t wait for next year’s AAS!

From a display at AAS