SEATTLE — The 51 Pegasi b Fellowship, an initiative of the Heising-Simons Foundation, supports early career astronomers – but until recently, it mostly supported male astronomers. Out of 12 winners, only two were female since the grant program began in 2017.
But in 2019, women won four out of six fellowships.
Last year, the foundation took the numbers as a wake-up call and changed their evaluation process with the help of Dr. Joyce Yen, director of the University of Washington’s ADVANCE Center for Institutional Change, an NSF-funded center to promote women in STEM on campus.
Yen recently published an article in the journal Nature Astronomy about how the evaluation process for fellowships can be more welcoming to female scientists, outlining how the Heising-Science Foundation used social science research to tweak its review methods.
The bridging of the two worlds is “increasingly common” in academia, she said, but “even though [social science] is in the vernacular and there is robust research on these topics, there’s still resistance. There are still people who are reluctant to change the way things have been done.”
As a former engineering faculty member, she sees her role as that of a “translator, synthesizer and liaison,” so STEM fields can “learn from the riches of social sciences.”
But she found the leadership of the Heising-Simons Foundation to be eager for change. Among other tweaks, the foundation nixed its requirement that universities nominate applicants, accepting applications from candidates themselves. The new application also asked for a diversity, equity and inclusion statement from applicants, and it developed a clear rubric for evaluating candidates, leaving less room for implicit bias.
