The Nonbinary Fraction: Looking Towards the Future of Gender Equity in Astronomy
Kaitlin C. Rasmussen, Erin Maier, Beck E. Strauss, Meredith Durbin, Luc Riesbeck, Aislynn Wallach, Vic Zamloot, Allison Erena
(Submitted on 10 Jul 2019)
Gender equity is one of the biggest issues facing the field of astrophysics, and there is broad interest in addressing gender disparities within astronomy. Many studies of these topics have been performed by professional astronomers 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 astronomers 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 astronomy community to best serve its marginalized members as we move into the next decade, a new paradigm must be developed. This paper aims to address the future of gender equity in astronomy by recommending better survey practices and institutional policies based on a more complex approach to gender.
Comments: 15 pages, 0 figures: APC white paper submitted to the Astro2020 Decadal Survey
Subjects: Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM); Physics and Society (physics.soc-ph)
Cite as: arXiv:1907.04893 [astro-ph.IM] (or arXiv:1907.04893v1 [astro-ph.IM] for this version)
Submission history
From: Erin Maier
[v1] Wed, 10 Jul 2019 19:13:07 UTC (17 KB)
