The Hubble Space Telescope has a gender problem. For at least the past 16 years, female researchers have had their requests to use the world’s most important telescope accepted at significantly lower rates than their male colleagues. But a switch to reviewing anonymised proposals is changing that, showing that selection processes can be biased against women.
Every year, astronomers around the world respond to an open call for proposals for time using Hubble. There can be up to 1000 proposals, with only 10 to 20 per cent given the green light to make observations.
In 2017, 27.5 per cent of the major proposals put forward were led by women. Of these, 13 per cent were approved, whereas proposals led by men had a 24 per cent approval rate. Previous years saw a similar disparity.
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Time on the telescope is a coveted resource. “There’s a real premium on getting Hubble time, and a lot of observational astronomers have built their careers with it,” says Priyamvada Natarajan at Yale University, who led Hubble’s 2018 Telescope Allocation Committee (TAC).
Access to space
It is particularly important for astronomers that don’t have the funding or institutional backing to use other major telescopes, which have more restricted access. The gender disparity meant that under-represented researchers faced an additional disadvantage.
So the Space Telescope Science Institute, which oversees the selection proceedings for Hubble, decided it was time for a change. In 2017, it brought in Stefanie Johnson, a leadership and diversity expert from the University of Colorado, to observe TAC meetings and advise on ways to mitigate the apparent bias.
Johnson says she was surprised at how little the discussions focused on the science at hand. Instead, she says, the committee often talked about the researchers themselves, their teams and their past work.
“When they’re talking about the scientist then I think they can be a little more influenced by not just their gender but their age or their race or their school,” says Johnson. “The differences may be small, but over time those little things add up.”
She suggested that they review anonymised proposals instead, with all identifying information removed from applications. The first such review has just finished and proposals led by women had an 8.7 per cent success rate and those led by men had an 8 per cent success rate (the lower success rates were due to a rise in submissions).
“It was immediately apparent in the tone of the discussion that this was a fundamentally different kind of evaluation,” says Natarajan. “It was much more fair, much deeper and more focused on scientific considerations.” It may not seem huge, but it was a big shift towards equity and fairness, and Natarajan says that the process will continue in future.
Hubble is the first major instrument in physics or astronomy to switch to reviewing anonymised proposals. It might be the start of a reckoning, because telescope proposals aren’t the only place where selection processes are biased against women and other under-represented groups, stunting their career opportunities.
“Once you see these results from Hubble, I just don’t see how there could be any other way of doing things,” says Johnson. “It just seems so clear that we need a change.”
