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Register a new userStudying Gender in Conference Talks -- data from the 223rd meeting of the American Astronomical Society
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We present a study on the gender balance, in speakers and attendees, at the recent major astronomical conference, the American Astronomical Society meeting 223, in Washington, DC. We conducted an informal survey, yielding over 300 responses by volunteers at the meeting. Each response included gender data about a single talk given at the meeting, recording the gender of the speaker and all question-askers. In total, 225 individual AAS talks were sampled. We analyze basic statistical properties of this sample. We find that the gender ratio of the speakers closely matched the gender ratio of the conference attendees. The audience asked an average of 2.8 questions per talk. Talks given by women had a slightly higher number of questions asked (3.2$pm$0.2) than talks given by men (2.6$pm$0.1). The most significant result from this study is that while the gender ratio of speakers very closely mirrors that of conference attendees, women are under-represented in the question-asker category. We interpret this to be an age-effect, as senior scientists may be more likely to ask questions, and are more commonly men. A strong dependence on the gender of session chairs is found, whereby women ask disproportionately fewer questions in sessions chaired by men. While our results point to laudable progress in gender-balanced speaker selection, we believe future surveys of this kind would help ensure that collaboration at such meetings is as inclusive as possible.
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The recent paper by AlShebli et al. (2020) investigates the impact of mentorship in young scientists. Among their conclusions, they state that female proteges benefit more from male than female mentorship. We herein expose a critical flaw in their methodological design that is a common issue in Astronomy, namely selection biases. An effect that if not treated properly may lead to unwarranted causality claims. In their analysis, selection biases seem to be present in the response rate of their survey (8.35%), the choice of database, success criterion, and the overlook of the numerous drawbacks female researchers face in academia. We discuss these issues and their implications -- one of them being the potential increase in obstacles for women in academia. Finally, we reinforce the dangers of not considering selection bias effects in studies aimed at retrieving causal relations.
Our society is changing. Almost nothing these days works without a computer chip. Computing power doubles every 18 months, and in ten years it will probably exceed the capabilities of a human brain. Computers perform approximately 70 percent of all financial transactions today and IBMs Watson now seems to give better customer advise than some human telephone hotlines. What does this imply for our future society?
In this article we wonder what the next 100 years will bring for women in astronomy in the UK. After this year of looking back and celebrating 100 years of women in the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS), we now ask: what might the future hold? Extrapolating current trends, when might we expect equality in the genders of RAS members, speakers at meetings, award winners and more? Ultimately, when might we stop needing to talk about women in astronomy at all - when it will be as irrelevant to the conversation about astronomy as being a male astronomer is?
Models that explain the economical and political realities of nowadays societies should help all the worlds citizens. Yet, the last four years showed that the current models are missing. Here we develop a dynamical society-deciders model showing that the long lasting economical stress can be solved when increasing fairness in nations. fairness is computed for each nation using indicators from economy and politics. Rather than austerity versus spending, the dynamical model suggests that solving crises in western societies is possible with regulations that reduce the stability of the deciders, while shifting wealth in the direction of the people. This shall increase the dynamics among socio-economic classes, further increasing fairness.
Peer punishment of free-riders (defectors) is a key mechanism for promoting cooperation in society. However, it is highly unstable since some cooperators may contribute to a common project but refuse to punish defectors. Centralized sanctioning institutions (for example, tax-funded police and criminal courts) can solve this problem by punishing both defectors and cooperators who refuse to punish. These institutions have been shown to emerge naturally through social learning and then displace all other forms of punishment, including peer punishment. However, this result provokes a number of questions. If centralized sanctioning is so successful, then why do many highly authoritarian states suffer from low levels of cooperation? Why do states with high levels of public good provision tend to rely more on citizen-driven peer punishment? And what happens if centralized institutions can be circumvented by individual acts of bribery? Here, we consider how corruption influences the evolution of cooperation and punishment. Our model shows that the effectiveness of centralized punishment in promoting cooperation breaks down when some actors in the model are allowed to bribe centralized authorities. Counterintuitively, increasing the sanctioning power of the central institution makes things even worse, since this prevents peer punishers from playing a role in maintaining cooperation. As a result, a weaker centralized authority is actually more effective because it allows peer punishment to restore cooperation in the presence of corruption. Our results provide an evolutionary rationale for why public goods provision rarely flourishes in polities that rely only on strong centralized institutions. Instead, cooperation requires both decentralized and centralized enforcement. These results help to explain why citizen participation is a fundamental necessity for policing the commons.
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