Hubble Telescope Test Inspires Changes at NASA to Combat Gender Bias

Stars don’t see gender, and now, NASA is working to not see it either when allocating telescope time to scientists, inspired by a successful experiment with the Hubble Space Telescope.

That experiment tested the hypothesis that if proposals are evaluated without knowledge of who wrote them and strictly on the merit of the science they proposed to do, the astronomers who received highly coveted observing time would end up being a more diverse group. That’s the principle behind dual-anonymous review, in which reviewers don’t know who submitted which proposals and proposers don’t know who reviewed their submissions. Dual-anonymous review is an attempt to reduce the warping power of implicit bias in the traditional review system, in which reviewers are anonymous but proposals include scientists’ names.

“We have noticed that in many of our proposal selections, there appears to be a bias in favor of one gender of proposer over another,” NASA Astrophysics Division Director Paul Hertz said during a town hall conversation held last month at the 235th meeting of the American Astronomical Society, in Honolulu.

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About the Author: DrStefanieKJohnson

Dr. Stefanie K. Johnson is an Associate Professor of Management at the Leeds School of Business, University of Colorado Boulder. She holds a Ph.D. from Rice University and is particularly interested in the effects of unconscious biases in the evaluation of women and minorities, with the goal of finding ways to mitigate those biases. Dr. Johnson brings bias to light with an engaging and humorous approach to advanced scientific research, which has earned her numerous accolades and invitations to present her work at meetings around the world, including the White House for a 2016 summit on diversity in corporate America on National Equal Pay Day, and the 2016 Harvard Negotiation and Leadership Conference. She has published over 70 journal articles and book chapters in outlets such as Harvard Business Review, Journal of Applied Psychology and The Academy of Management Journal. She has extensive consulting experience and has created and delivered leadership-development training with an emphasis on evidence-based practice. In recognition of her unique research, Dr. Johnson has been awarded nearly three million dollars in external funding to study leadership and create leadership development programs aimed at increasing safety. Media outlets featuring her work include: The Economist, Newsweek, Time, and CNN. Stefanie lives in the Boulder Bubble in Colorado with her Biology Professor husband, two young kiddos, and two old kitties.