Leadership and Participation in NASA’s Explorer-Class Missions

Joan Centrella, Michael New, Meagan Thompson
(Submitted on 18 Sep 2019)

We have conducted a data study of leadership and participation in NASA’s Astrophysics Explorer-class missions for the nine solicitations issued during the period 2008-2016, using gender as a marker of diversity. During this time, 102 Principal Investigators (PIs) submitted Explorer-class proposals; only four of these PIs were female. Among the 102 PIs, there were 61 unique PIs overall; of these, just three were female. The percentage of females in science teams in these proposals ranges from a low of 10% to a high of 19% across the various solicitations. Combining data from all these Explorer-class proposals, we find that the overall participation by females in science teams is 14%. Eighteen of the Explorer-class proposals had zero females in science roles, and this includes science teams with as many as 28 members. These results demonstrate that participation by women in the leadership of and, in many cases, on the science teams of proposals for Explorer-class missions is well below the representation of women in astronomy and astrophysics as a whole. In this white paper, we present our data and a discussion of our results, their context, and the ramifications for consideration by Astro2020 in its study of the state of the profession.

Comments:    Astro2020 State of the Profession Considerations White Paper; contains supplementary material
Subjects:    Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM)
Cite as:    arXiv:1909.10314 [astro-ph.IM]  (or arXiv:1909.10314v1 [astro-ph.IM] for this version)
Submission history
From: Joan Centrella [view email]
[v1] Wed, 18 Sep 2019 16:31:36 UTC (965 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.10314