Astronomy, Women in

Women have historically been excluded from astronomy as a subject of study and a field of employment, and this remains partly the case today. Worldwide, it is estimated that women represent about a quarter of all professional astronomers. However, the International Astronomical Union (IAU), the worldwide professional organization for astronomers, found that, in 2008, only 15 percent of its members were women, although this figure is rising. In many countries, such as the United States, the proportion of women in astronomy is higher than their proportion in physics overall, both among students and faculty.

The proportion of women in astronomy depends to a large extent on the national context. The proportion [Page 96]of women among members of the IAU in 2008 varied from none to over a third, although it is worth mentioning that, in many countries, numbers were too small for statistics to be significant. In the European Union, the proportion of women among IAU members was higher than the 15 percent world average in Italy (25 percent), Bulgaria (25 percent), France (24 percent), Hungary (21 percent), and Ireland (20 percent). On the contrary, their proportion was below the world average in Germany (9 percent), Denmark (10 percent), and the United Kingdom (12 percent). In the United States, women represented 12 percent of IAU members and in Australia, 15 percent.

The level of representation of women among professional astronomers also varies according to the seniority of the job, with the proportion of women in senior positions tending to be disproportionately small. In the United States, data from the American Astronomical Society's Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy published in 2003 showed a sharp decrease as the level of seniority increases: women represented 30 percent of astronomy graduates, but only 22 percent of postdoctoral researchers, 20 percent of assistant professors, 21 percent of associate professors, and 9 percent of full professors. In a similar vein, the Astronomy Decadal Review Demographics Survey, published in 2005 and conducted by the Australian Academy of Science, showed that, in Australian astronomy, women represented 37 percent of postgraduates, but only 10 percent of tenured staff. Worldwide, it is also very unusual to find a woman at management level in research institutes of astronomy. In countries where such data is collected, the presence of women at that level is close to none.

Women astronomers also tend to remain in the background and their works not acknowledged to the same extent as men's works. Biographies of women astronomers have been produced to highlight their contribution to the field, although the likes of Hildegard von Bingen and Maria Cunitz are yet to become household names in an equivalent way to the likes of Galileo Galilei and Johannes Kepler. The attribution in 1974 of the physics Nobel Prize to the supervisor of Jocelyn Bell for her discovery of the first radio pulsars when she was a postgraduate student is commonly used to illustrate the lack of acknowledgement faced by women astronomers (and women in science, more generally).

Important changes in the 1970s and the subsequent establishment of a more egalitarian gender contract in most of the Western world have meant that events such as the one experienced by Jocelyn Bell may have become more unlikely. Since the 1990s, “women in science” is on the agenda of many governments and international organizations, such as the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the European Commission. In astronomy in particular, the 1992 Baltimore Charter for Women in Astronomy and the 2003 Pasadena Recommendations for Gender Equality in Astronomy have raised issues of gender equality in astronomy, with the former recommending some major changes in organizational practices, endorsed in 2005 by the American Astronomical Society Committee. More recently, a resolution was passed at the 2009 IAU General Assembly, backing the need to support women astronomers at all levels of the career ladder (Resolution B4, On Supporting Women in Astronomy). As part of the 2009 International Year of Astronomy, the “She Is an Astronomer” cornerstone project, which has similar aims, was launched.

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