Famous Astronomoms: Cecilia Payne-Gaposhkin

I read about Ada Lovelace Day on Thesis with Children on March 25th. Ada Lovaelcae Day is March 24th. It's a day when bloggers are asked to blog about women in technology who have inspired them. So I missed it by over a week, but better late than never....

I decided anyway to take a different twist on it - so here is my first article in what might turn into a series on famous women astronomers who also happen to be mothers.

Cecilia Payne-Gaposhkin (1900-1979)

Cecilia Payne-Gaposhkin is famous for the work she did in the early 1920s at the Harvard College Observatory on the classification of stellar spectra. For her PhD research under Harlow Shapley she used ionization theory to re-order the then alphabetical (based on the strength of the Halpha line) stellar classifications into the famous OBAFGKM which orders star types by temperature. Incidentally she also proved that the Sun was mostly made of hydrogen.

She was born in the UK on May 10th 1900, the daughter of a London Barrister. However her father died when she was only 4 years old, so her mother raised her (and her two siblings) alone. She won a scholarship to attend Cambridge University (Newnam College) in 1919, reading Natural Sciences. During her time in Cambridge a lecture given by Eddington (on his 1919 expedition to Africa to test the gravitational deflection of light by observing stars near the Sun during a solar eclipse) inspired her to study Astronomy further. At the time Cambridge admitted women, but would not grant them degrees, so doctoral studies for her in England seemed out of the question. However things were opening up more in the US, and she had attended a lecture by Dr. Harlow Shapley (the Director of the Harvard College Observatory) in 1922. She wrote to Dr. Shapley asking if it would be possible to study under him at Harvard (under the advice of Eddington). The Harvard College Observatory had just started a graduate program in astronomy, and even had a special fellowship to encourage women to study. Then then Miss Payne became the second student to win this fellowship and travelled to the US in 1923. She was the first person to be granted a PhD. in astronomy from Harvard (in 1925) - although this was because the Physics department refused to grant a PhD to a woman so the Department of Astronomy was created to get around this!

She met her husband Sergei Gaposhkin while on holiday in Europe in 1932. He was a Russian Astronomer in Nazi Germany and having a very difficult time, so to help him out she found him a position at Harvard. They were married less than 2 years later in 1934. They had 3 children together, Edward, Katherine and Peter. Dr. Payne-Gaposhkin continued to study astronomy her whole life, remaining at Harvard. She was a technical assistant to Shapley from 1927-1938, and became frustrated at her low pay and status at the university. Shapley persuaded them to give her the title of "astronomer" in 1938, but it wasn't until 1956 (when Dr. Payne-Gaposhkin was 56 years old) that further intervention from the Observatory Director (then Donald Menzel) persuaded Harvard to make her a full-professor, and in fact the first female professor of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

Dr. Payne-Gaposhkin was a trail blazer for women in astronomy, and only incidentally was also a mother (although presumably that's not how her children saw it!). I researched this article only online, but I'm now inspired to try to read her autobiography - The Dyer's Hand to learn more of the details, in particular about her life after having her children. Her career progression was incredibly slow and frustrating, even after her seminal early work - without which she clearly would not have been able to stay in Astronomy at all. She wrote in her auto-biography "I simply went on plodding, rewarded by the beauty of the scenery towards an unexpected goal."

The Broken Career Path, or "What She Said"....

A great post this week over at Women in Astronomy on what the current "Decadal Review" process in the US Astronomy Community ought to be addressing with regard to the career path in Astronomy. I especially relate to the quote:

Considering how I feel about being a postdoc right now, I'm not really looking forward to the future, if this is as good as it gets.

I said a couple of weeks ago (in this post) that I was starting to see the good side of postdoc life - but actually I think what I was starting to see is how much worse it will get if I ever manage to become faculty. Is that really what I want in life..... I'm starting to think not.

Hannah says:

it's a wonder that much astronomy gets done in the winter.

- I think it's a wonder any gets done by any postdoc! Perhaps this is the advantage Australian astronomers have and why there seem to be so many of them relative to the population of Australia (can't explain Holland though...).

Sometimes I think that the ones who get the jobs are the ones who are stubborn enough to just keep applying rather than the ones who are the best scientists.

This could have come right out of my mouth. So reassuring to know I'm not the only one thinking this!

Hannah goes on to suggest some solutions to the problem including:

to simply decrease the number of PhDs being produced to match the number of jobs. And now I hear all the department chairs out there laughing. Given that the number of students a department attracts is a measure of its success, I don't see that happening any time soon.

This I don't think is the answer at all anyway. I think Hannah's next point is much more important. My friend at the Visible Universe (who is too busy being a big TV researcher now to blog) put it very well in response to one of my very first posts here:

I don't believe that money is wasted if a student doesn't pursue a research career. There are many fields where individuals with real, hands-on science experience are desperately needed--science policy, science journalism, education--and having scientifically trained people in those positions can only be a good thing for the field.

I now firmly believe that the more science PhDs there are out in the world the better. But they need to be educated in such a way as to see the value of their training outside the narrow limits of academic research. There ought to be stipulations on funding for graduate students that they spend a certain about of time being educated about all the fun, exciting and worthwhile things they can do after graduate school. And the research faculty either need to be trained to do this, or forced to involve non-academic astronomers in the process. I shouldn't be sitting here today, a relatively successful scientist, with a PhD and lots of great skills wondering if I could get any job at all if I decide to "give up" on Astronomy. Who killed my confidence? I know it died in the last couple of years of graduate school.... was that my fault, or do I claim to be a victim of a broken system....

Hannah says again:

Now I hear all the professors grumbling, "why should we bother investing our time and energy to train graduate students in astronomy if they aren't going to continue in astronomy?" To which I can only say, "why are you training them for jobs that don't exist?"

Couldn't put it better myself.

Sorry for a slightly down post on a Friday. It's been one of those weeks.

11am is the New 3pm

My productivity has taken a dive lately (or maybe it just feels that way). I came to a realization as I walked home on Friday - most of my day is before lunch now. It used to be (before baby) I started work around 10am, had lunch at noon, then worked until 6-7pm. I was used to the normal mid afternoon lethargy and has adjusted to a 3pm tea break. However now I start work at 9am, eat lunch around 1pm (because of a change in country and lunchtime culture), and leave for the nursery at about 4.45pm (or a little later - I'm always running late for little one's pick up time!). Instead of 2 hours before lunch and 5 after it, I now have 4 hours before lunch and only 2.75 after it. So 11am is my new 3pm. Accordingly the past few mornings I had a coffee and snack at 11am (traditional elevenses even). Let's see if I suddenly get a lot done....

Stop Trying To Get "X" and Start Trying To Enjoy Yourself

I was lucky enough to attend a large university for graduate school which had enormous numbers of science graduate students. At some point a group of students set up a series of events about academic careers for scientists. This series brought Rick Reis in to talk - and as a result we all got signed up for his "Tomorrow's Professor" mailing list. Now I get emails from this list about once a week. Sometimes they're interesting, sometimes I delete them. Every once in a while I find one that's very useful and really strikes a cord. That happened this week with the posting on Stop Trying to Get Tenure and Start Trying To Enjoy Yourself. Not that I'm in a position to worry about tenure since I'm still just a postdoc - but I think the principle applies to me - in that I should "Stop Trying to Get a "Permanent Job" and Start Trying to Enjoy Myself". I'll see how that goes. "Trying to Get a Permanent Job" clearly isn't working out that well (another chance bites the dust...).

Related to this, I think I have just recently realised what a nice job being a postdoc is. (Apart from the uncertain future and the stress associated with that - especially in an era of job cuts and lowering funding). I can mess around doing research and for the most part not worry about faculty meetings, teaching when I don't want to, being nice to the university administration (or even meeting them), reading job candidate letters, calling prospective graduate students and all the hundreds of other non-research related items I see the staff doing. In a permanent position I know I won't be expected to do any less research, I'll just have all that stuff added on top of my already hectic life. I actually can't see where I would fit it all in.

So I think "Stop Trying to Get "X" and Start Trying to Enjoy Yourself" is probably good advice for us all in our jobs and throughout life.

Counting days

Like everybody else in this business, Boyfriend and I have to travel a lot; conferences, workshops, seminars, observing runs... Within a reasonable limit, we have tried not to let the fact that we have a child change that too much. Of course I didn't travel in the first few months, and there's the occasional heartache of missing some important milestones that goes with this. But overall it's been going well. I think part of the key to that was to get Chatton used from the start that maman and papa were going to be away from home sometimes. He's never made a fuss about it, and actually behaves extra-nicely with the one parent that stays behind to take care of him!

But now that he's older, he started missing us more and more when we are gone. I'm surprised by this, I thought if there would have been problems, they would have come up when he was smaller. It's not really a problem, he's still mostly as happy as usual when one of us is gone, but he mentions often (especially at night) that he misses us.

So we have come up with a trick to help him with that. Whenever one of us travels for more than a couple of days, we take a large piece of paper and make a calendar for Chatton, with one blank box for every day that Boyfriend or I are gone from home. Then each morning he gets to draw a picture in that day's box. This way he sees clearly how much time has gone and how soon the missing parent is coming home. Since time is a vague concept for young children, we find that this helps him a lot to keep track of what is going on. He can see that there are still X days left, so he's not asking us and himself all the time "when is mummy/daddy coming back?". Being aware of what is going on seems to make him feel more secure about the whole thing. Of course there's also iChat or Skype to keep in touch, much better than just the phone for small kids.

I was just away for almost three weeks on a work trip (the longest either one of us has been away from home since Chatton was born), and though he obviously missed me, everything went very well. He even found an idea for an Astronomy-related thing to draw each day on his calendar, so I now have this really cool set of drawings for my office wall!

If anybody has other tricks or ideas of things to do to make being away from home easier on the little ones, please share!

Designed to tempt me?

I haven't met a mother who's totally happy with her body image. I'm definitely not - although mostly I do nothing about it, even objectively I know I could use to lose 10 lbs or so. If found this Chocolate Blog today. which seems totally designed to tempt me. What is it about chocolate - why do I feel such a physical drag towards it....?

My 10 random things about being a mother

So I finally got around to tackle Astronomum's challenge of coming up with my list of 10 random things about being a mother. Here it goes:

1. I love reading stories to my son, and getting new books for him. I can spend a lot of time in the child section of a bookstore, and I probably spend more money than I should on that...

2. I both like and dislike always being the youngest mom out of all the parents of my son's friends. It makes me feel young and cool, but it's annoying because I often don't have that much in common with these people which are 10-15 years older than me.

3. One of the things I like the best is to watch my son and his dad play together. I'm amazed by how Boyfriend can get totally into these games, and give them his undivided attention. I wish I could do that too!

4. If I could magically change one thing about my life as a mother/scientist, it would be to get to live closer to family. With two careers and a child, I often wish we could get help from family once in a while, it would make things much easier I think.

5. I'm currently expecting a second child, a baby girl. I was so relieved when we found out, there was something about the idea of having two boys that was giving me nightmares.

6. Boyfriend and I have a tendency to spoil our son, not with sweets, toys or other things like that, but with our time and attention. I thought there was nothing wrong with that, but sometimes I'm afraid he will come to expect that kind of attention all the time and from everyone. Hopefully this won't be a problem when his little sister shows up.

7. I'm not much of a baby person. I'll gladly go through the first year with baby, but mostly because I know how fun it will be after that when she grows up a little.

8. Sometimes I get bored at the playground, which makes me feel guilty: shouldn't I be enjoying every single moment I spend with my child?

9. Like most women, the deadly sin I'm most guilty of is pride: I think my son is the most incredible person I have ever met, I can't even begin to explain how proud of him I am.

10. I'm glad I had my first child while in grad school since it gave me the chance to prove some people wrong (think older male faculty): it's possible to be a good mother and a successful young researcher at the same time! Actually, that's another thing I'm very proud of :)