The Best Australian Science Writing 2015 (28 page)

Dg = GB(lead)/GB(all)

where GB(lead) is the gender balance or proportion of women in leadership positions (usually <0.2) and GB(all) is the proportion of women across all staff and students (usually >0.5). Most universities would have Dg values of 0.4 or below. Those who score the maximum D values of 1 would zip up to the top of university rankings. If the D-index was implemented, would we see an exponential rise in women, people of colour, Asian and Indigenous people in leadership positions? I'd sure like to find out.

5. K-index

K is for kids. One issue that crops up again and again is that primary caring responsibilities often fall to women, with a consequent reduction in their academic competitiveness (unless their track record is considered, fairly, relative to opportunity). So problematic is this issue that some women choose to forgo having children to remain competitive in their career. Why do we make it so difficult for the smartest women to reproduce? Wouldn't it be good for the world, and for universities, if we made it easier? At the same time, male academics want to spend more time caring for their kids, but face stigma and lack of support from colleagues and bosses for taking time off for parental duties. Why do we make it so difficult for the brightest men to participate in the most important work of all? Wouldn't it be good for the world, and for universities, if we made it easier? Germany dealt with this specific problem by awarding an extra two months to the standard 12 months paid parental leave when both parents took time off to care for their children. The K-index celebrates the birth of children to academics:

K = (A+3B+C+D)/E

where A is the number of days of parental leave taken by women over the past year, B is the number of days of parental leave taken by men over the past year, C is the number of childcare places on campus, D is the number of parenting rooms on campus and E is the total number of staff and students on campus. On this metric, those universities that best support and encourage families will rocket to the top of international rankings, and most likely will have to turn away large numbers of outstanding students and academics.

Endnote

You may say I'm a dreamer… well, you know the rest. I'm also something of a realist. No doubt if these indices are implemented, game-playing would follow with unintended consequences. Nevertheless, it's been interesting to think about university metrics that might drive new, perhaps more socially just, workplace behaviours. Maybe next I'll dream up some indicators for ranking individual academics …

The women who fell through the cracks of the Universe

Revisiting Milgram's shocking obedience experiments

The women who fell through the cracks of the Universe

Lauren Fuge

In the early 1880s, astronomer Edward Charles Pickering had a problem: he had data coming out of his ears. Ever since being instated as director of the Harvard College Observatory in 1877, he'd been lobbying for improved astrophotography facilities. Finally, his observatory had the capabilities to image the stars for analysis at a later date, instead of the tedium of real-time nakedeye observations … and suddenly photos of star fields were being taken at a rate too rapid for Pickering's staff to keep up with.

What's worse, his assistant was
useless.
So Pickering did what any sensible astronomer would do – he fired his assistant and hired his maid, Williamina Fleming, as a replacement.

Fleming had a background in school teaching, not in astronomy, but she proved so adept at computing and cataloguing that Pickering soon hired a whole host of women as assistants and put Fleming in charge of them. In total, over 80 women worked for him during his tenure at the Harvard College Observatory. Pickering's goal was to photograph and catalogue the entire sky, and these women – some of whom were educated astronomers – threw themselves into the work.

The women came to be known as Pickering's Harem, or, as I prefer, the Harvard Computers, because they were essentially employed as human computers. They reduced the photographs of star fields to render them as clear as possible, performed complex calculations to determine the positions of the stars in the sky, analysed the light from each star to determine what elements they were composed of, and classified them according to catalogues.

It was incredibly important work in the history of astronomy. These women took the first steps towards mapping the universe, providing the foundations for larger astronomical theory to be developed over the next century. They discovered and deciphered new suns, and they contributed enormously to the first Henry Draper Catalogue, a catalogue of more than 10 000 stars classified according to spectrum, published by Pickering in 1890.

Although the implications of their data were huge, the work of the Harvard Computers was dry, tedious, and meticulous. They put in six-day weeks and worked for between 25 and 50 cents per hour, the wage of a factory worker. Some of these women were trained astronomers, and yet their tasks working for Pickering were essentially secretarial. At the time, the cold, damp conditions of an observatory dome were deemed unsuitable for women, but by only allowing his female assistants to work with photographs, Pickering could place them in more ‘appropriate' office settings. He allowed some to make direct observations, but these were exceptions; mostly, his assistants were barred from producing real, theoretical work. There was little chance to progress to more important and demanding positions – after 20 years working at the observatory, Fleming was finally given the title of Curator of Astronomical Photos, i.e. ‘official' supervisor.

The Harvard Computers are an example of the ‘harem effect': a phenomenon where a male scientist in a position of power, such as Pickering as the director of a well-known observatory, hires a
predominantly female staff for subordinate positions. The harem effect has pervaded the history of science for a couple of reasons. The lower rate of pay for women allowed for more employees to be hired with the same budget, which was especially important for Pickering, who needed to process large amounts of data efficiently. Women were also seen as less threatening than men in the same position – competent, but not perceived as competition for the male in power.

But the women who worked for Pickering deserve more than to be lumped together and dismissed as a sad sociological effect, as a product of the times. The Harvard Computers paved the way not only for modern astronomy but also for women in science, and they deserve to be remembered.

Some of the Harvard Computers produced their own notable research and obtained a level of respect among female scientists of the era. Take Antonia Maury, for example – a graduate from Vassar College, Pickering hired her to help reclassify the stars in his original Henry Draper Catalogue. Along with Pickering and Fleming, Maury worked on a system to classify stars based on their temperature. Her system, published in 1897, was largely ignored but later Annie Jump Cannon, a Wellesley College graduate, came to the Harvard Observatory and reworked the system again. Cannon's redesign was developed into the Harvard Classification System, which has been adopted by the International Astronomical Union as the official worldwide system of star classification.

Annie Jump Cannon is perhaps the most famous of the Harvard Computers, though you've likely never heard of her. She specialised in analysing absorption spectra and was so prolific, she could classify over 50 000 stars per year.

‘They aren't just streaks to me,' Cannon said once. ‘Each new spectrum is the gateway to a wonderful new world. It is almost as if the distant stars had really acquired speech and were able to tell of their constitution and physical condition.'

She was awarded six honorary doctorate degrees for her influential work, including the first degree from Oxford ever presented to a woman. Cannon also won the Ellen Richards Prize, which was awarded by the Association to Aid Scientific Research by Women, but shortly after it was given to her in the 1930s, the award was disbanded. The organisers legitimately thought that the struggle of women in science had ended, and everything was now fine.

Cannon, thankfully, knew what was really up. She used her prize money to establish a new award for women in science, which was awarded to luminaries such as Payne-Gaposchkin and Maury, and is still helping female astronomers today.

Dozens of other Harvard Computers were notable for work they did beyond Pickering's research. Margaret Harwood was later appointed the director of the Maria Mitchell Observatory, becoming the first female director of an independent observatory. Johanna Mackie discovered the first nova (a bright explosion caused by the reignition of a dormant star) in the constellation of Lyra, and was awarded the gold medal from the American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO). Ida Woods was also honoured by AAVSO for discovering more than seven novae within the Milky Way galaxy. Henrietta Swan Leavitt discovered 2400 variable stars throughout her career. These stars regularly brighten and then grow dim again, and Leavitt developed the period-luminosity law still in use today, which gives a relationship between the brightness of a variable star and the length of time taken to go through one cycle and return to its original level of light. Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin was a variable star expert who became the first person to obtain a research PhD at the Harvard Observatory, and later became the first female tenured professor at Harvard.

How many of their names do you know? If these women have been forgotten, then how many more thousands of women
have helped discover fundamental aspects of our universe only to be swept under the rug, their names lost to future generations? How many landmark scientific projects involved women who were forgotten when it came to writing books, typing up Wikipedia pages and handing out Nobel prizes?

Craters on the Moon and Mars are named after Pickering, but his female assistants fell through the cracks into obscurity. Remember them. They mapped the stars – their names should still shine today.

Light

Job description

What shall we teach the children

Beating the odds

Trent Dalton

He whispered in a Scottish drawl: ‘You wanna see somethin' cool?'

Professor John Fraser has been an intensive care specialist for two decades. He established the Critical Care Research Group at Brisbane's Prince Charles Hospital in 2004. He's seen cool things before: heart transplants; machines that can rebuild a blackened human lung before your eyes; bodies of children wrenched from the cold and still grip of beyond.

It was three years ago when he whispered the invitation, at a backyard barbecue at his house in Brisbane's northern suburbs. We were eating sausages, talking about outdoor music systems controlled by one's mobile phone. The things we humans can accomplish. Our wives went to school together. I'd known him for 13 years, long enough to know that when he asks if you would like to see something cool he's not about to show you a Harley-Davidson motorcycle.

John led me into his house, up a set of stairs to the main bedroom. He said a genius had moved into the office next to his at Prince Charles, an obsessive young biomedical engineer who rarely ate, rarely slept, spent his days and nights clanging and banging and grinding away at strange metal objects. John was
privy to the best-kept secret in Australian medical science. His name was Daniel Timms and inside his small solitary office in Chermside, Brisbane, he was building a miracle.

John unzipped a suitcase which lay in the middle of his bed. He had just returned from overseas. The surgeon dug his hand into a pile of travel clothes and pulled out a pair of dark green men's underpants, moth-eaten and frayed. ‘Here you go,' he said, placing the underpants in my hands. ‘Don't worry, they're clean.'

The underpants wrapped and protected something metal, lightweight and spherical, not much smaller than a tennis ball, weighing about 500 grams. Made of titanium, with clean design lines, it was so perfect and neat and unfamiliar that it felt alien, a product not of our Earth, not of our time. ‘The BiVACOR,' John said.