Date: Wed, 28 Jul 1999 14:09:55 -0500 (EST)
Subject: CSWA Newsletter of 7/28/99
To: AASMAIL: ;

            AAS Committee on the Status of Women
     weekly issues of  7/28/99, ed. by Priscilla Benson
***  send email and addresses to aaswomenwellesley.edu  ***

This week's issue:

1.  More Meeting Statistics

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1.  More Meeting Statistics
From: Kathryn Mead kmeadearthlink.net

In response to Meg's posting, several members of organizing 
committees have responded. Perhaps they could give us some 
insight into how speakers are chosen.

Do the committee members choose people they know? Is there 
an "objective" selection process? Are "big name" people 
chosen in order to boost the "quality" of the meeting? How 
much weight do selectors give to whether the invited speaker 
actually gives good talks? How much conscious effort is made 
to have a diverse selection of invited speakers - diversity 
not just of gender but of seniority, affiliation etc. (I'm 
cynically assuming that this doesn't happen without 
conscious, though perhaps non-verbalized, thought.)

In closing, a non-astronomy issue: How about the US Women's 
National Soccer team winning the World Cup in front of 
90,123 fans in a sold out Rose Bowl and a TV audience larger 
than the Stanley Cup or NBA finals?? I hope you all weren't 
too busy with your work to miss this empowering event. 
Thanks to these gracious, dedicated and talented women, the 
status of women in our society has taken a great leap 
forward.  :-)

Kathy Mead

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From:	IN%"donucolick.org"  "Don Osterbrock"

	The AAS Centennial Committee, of which I was chair and 
Bob O'Dell vice-chair was responsible for planning all the 
AAS historical activities in connection with the AAS 
Centennial and in particular the Centennial meeting in 
Chicago in May/June.  Thus we were, in a sense the COC 
(Continental Organizing Committee, as in addition to the US 
members we had one Canadian and one Mexican member, one a 
man and one a woman).  Of the 27 members of the Committee 
this year, at the end of its work, 18 were men and 9 were 
women.  Most of them were on from the Committee from when it 
was set up in 1995, but not all, and a few original members 
had gone off (because their terms as AAS vice presidents 
ended, or one who died); of the 30 people who were members 
of it at one time or another, 20 were men and 10 were women.
	We organized two invited historical sessions at the 
Centennial meeting for the whole Society (in addition to 
other divisional historical sessions which were organized by 
the HAD and SPD).  One was a single speaker, the editor of 
the AAS Centennial book, a man, who gave an invited talk on 
the history of the AAS.  The other session we organized was 
on the future of the Society and of astronomy, with 3 
speakers, all former presidents of the AAS, two of them 
women and one a man.  If you want to lump these into one 
figure, two of the speakers for the historical sessions 
organized by the COC = Centenial Committee were women, and 
two were men.
	All best,		Yours,			Don

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From: Nancy Evans evanshead-cfa.harvard.edu

Good to see all the conference numbers coming in. Here's 
another one.  For the upcoming pulsation conference (IAU 
Coll 176) in Budapest:

Speakers:

men   45
women  7
don't know 1

     Nancy Evans

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From:	IN%"szkodyalicar.astro.washington.edu"

Here are the dismal stats for the last meeting I attended in 
my field:

Symposium on Cataclysmic Variables, April 12-16, 1999, 
Oxford, England

SOC: 3 men  0 women
Invited Speakers: 30 men, 1 woman
Session Chairs: 14 men, 0 women

There were some short talks by 4-5 women but only the 
invited talks appeared in the printed program and in the 
resulting journal issue of New Astronomy Reviews so they 
define the meeting. From my own experience, the resulting 
meeting roster really depends on the composition of the SOC 
and whether they have as a goal a broad representation from 
different countries, ages and genders.
Paula

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End of CSWA Newsletter of 7/28/99