Monday

Research has shown that gender and nationality can affect the award of time to use telescopes, in systems that are supposed to be fair and transparent. Motivated by anecdotal suggestions, I investigated whether being on the time awarding committee could also influence outcome (work published in Res. Notes AAS 2 203). For a major telescope facility with entirely open data on membership and time awards, I found that gender was again a factor in success - but being on the committee had an effect ten times larger. Proposers tripled their chances of getting telescope time by being on the committee, compared to periods both before and after. My original hypothesis was that being seen at a high-level meeting created an unconscious bias, i.e. an impression that the proposer must be a high-level scientist. However, the magnitude of the effect may suggest more powerful biases are at work - discussion of what is going on, how better to investigate it, and solutions for more fairness are thus highly welcome outcomes for this talk.