Status Report

Nonbinary Systems: Looking Towards the Future of Gender Equity in Planetary Science

By SpaceRef Editor
September 17, 2020
Filed under , ,

Beck E. Strauss, Schuyler R. Borges, Thea Faridani, Jennifer A. Grier, Avery Kiihne, Erin R. Maier, Charlotte Olsen, Theo O’Neill, Edgard G. Rivera-Valentín, Evan L. Sneed, Dany Waller, Vic Zamloot

Gender equity remains a major issue facing the field of planetary science, and there is broad interest in addressing gender disparities within space science and related disciplines. Many studies of these topics have been performed by professional planetary scientists who are relatively unfamiliar with research in fields such as gender studies and sociology. As a result, they adopt a normative view of gender as a binary choice of ‘male’ or ‘female,’ leaving planetary scientists whose genders do not fit within that model out of such research entirely. Reductive frameworks of gender and an overemphasis on quantification as an indicator of gendered phenomena are harmful to people of marginalized genders, especially those who live at the intersections of multiple axes of marginalization such as race, disability, and socioeconomic status. In order for the planetary science community to best serve its marginalized members as we move into the next decade, a new paradigm must be established. This paper aims to address the future of gender equity in planetary science by recommending better survey practices and institutional policies based on a more profound approach to gender.

Comments: 7 pages, 0 figures, State of the Profession white paper for the Planetary Science and Astrobiology Decadal Survey 2023-2032. Co-signers list can be found here: this https URL. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1907.04893

Subjects: Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM)

Cite as: arXiv:2009.08247 [astro-ph.IM] (or arXiv:2009.08247v1 [astro-ph.IM] for this version)

Submission history

From: Erin Maier 

[v1] Tue, 15 Sep 2020 20:35:28 UTC (1,237 KB)

https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.08247

SpaceRef staff editor.