 Which is great. I think it's great. Yes. This is a case where bias data is A-OK. My name is Sarah Jane Schmidt, and I'm from the AIP Potsband. I'm Jim Davenport from the University of Washington. My name is Stephanie Douglas. I'm an NSF fellow at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. That's a good question. Science you think is on camera. Right here, what? You're not drinking coffee. I've got a lot of coffee, which is not surprising. Oh yeah, I need a high grade. I'm not drinking enough water, and this counts a little bit. All right, so today I'm having coffee with Stephanie Douglas and Sarah Schmidt, two of my closest science overlapping friends in astronomy. We have been friends for a long time, and our science interests overlap massively. Today, the goal is to talk about the gender survey that we've been doing, which both of them have contributed to throughout many, many years of it going on. And we've been scheming about what the future is. So hopefully this video will just be sort of a behind-the-scenes scheming session. Okay, so over the course of the project, how much data have you gotten? I think, well, when we did the nature paper, I think we said something like a thousand talks roughly. You pointed out we've got really good coverage for this meeting. Yeah. And so from the Cool Stars talks, we probably have now hundreds, maybe 200 total. You both did such a good analysis of the last two Cool Stars that we should be able to do, like, real evolution now. And we've had interventions this time, right? Like, the game changed a little bit. The rules changed just a little bit. Well, and that, as we've talked about, has been getting some grumbling from usually the more senior, but not exclusively the more senior people. Things that we thought should make the fraction of women asking questions increase, and none of, we didn't really see a significant change, only a very slight one. And so I'll be interested to see if the sort of, at least semi-sustained and intentional interventions by the SOC actually make a difference in how that balanced out. We've also seen very different chair styles, and even amongst the ones who are correcting, some of them seem to approach as a joke, and others seem to really kind of get, like, what we're doing and why. Most people know how to play nice, but... A few bad apples. Well, I think even if we could provide, so I didn't, unfortunately, ran late and didn't see the intro on Monday, but I think providing some guidance of, like, can you rephrase your comment as a question, which may not necessarily be ideal either, but even just to, like, have you considered X instead of, well, you know, X contradicts what you say or something, can come across as at least more polite and putting the respectful of maybe the speaker just didn't have time to put it in? I always just think, like, oh, if only people understood, if we could make them understand. I keep on, and it's sometimes a mistake, thinking that we're scientists. If we show them the data that says we're doing things wrong, they'll change. So part of me is, like, we should show them the data and give them another chance, but I know you're never going to get everyone. I think you're right in that we definitely should show the data. I keep thinking, like, this has, it has reached its peak of people knowing about it. Like, if they're not following me on Twitter at this point, or either of you... Or watching a vlog. Or, yeah, or watching the YouTube vlog, hit that subscribe button. But every year I run into, like, 20 more people who are like, oh, that's awesome. If we can find a large enough audience to speak the data to, I think we'll find a lot of kindred spirits. I think we'll have some people who will, you know, have said that the survey was impetus for her to stand up and ask questions. Like, just to skew the statistics. And I've heard other people say the same thing as well. Right. Which is great. I think it's great. Yes. This is a case where bias data is a-okay. Yeah. Bias your data, everyone. We're changing the world. What do you think of the people who say, oh, this effect you're seeing, it is only due to new senior? I mean, there are some ways we can take data to counteract that. I've definitely made that argument in the past. To me, my gut says that... Yeah, it's a secondary effect. Yes. Yeah, gender, age. Gender and then age, yeah. Well, I think the argument I've heard some people make is that the seniority is the primary effect and we're actually observing the secondary effect. I guess anecdotally I disagree with that because I know quite a few senior women who have talked about this study and how important they find it. Yeah, but I think you may, you could also see a senior effect where if that's the type of questioning session that they're used to, if they don't see a problem with it or that fits them well, then they're not going to necessarily want to challenge it or they're not going to necessarily want to be seen as the woman who rocks the boat on it. You made this comment to me maybe two years ago that are we, like on a deeper philosophical level, are we measuring the thing that we care about? Like, is asking questions actually something good? I mean, it's nice because it's a measurable thing. You can put it in different boxes and add it up. There's an onslaught there that says the right interaction is Q&A. But that is the correct way to engage at a meeting. You know, our stated goal is to make meetings better or whatever. But like, why don't I just make them more chatty? Better. Well, we want interactions at a meeting and the point is we want all people to come to the table. Not this table, it's very small, but we want to make the table big enough for everyone. And I think one of the problems we're encountering is I don't think everyone is on board with that goal. Often it's true that you have to provide, and this is co-opting a term from the accessibility and disability community, a multimodal access where you want many approaches to being able to do an activity so that people with different abilities can come to the table. And you know, sometimes it's ability, sometimes it's what your personality is, right? Like, some people are going to function well in a giant lecture hall, and others aren't. Some are going to function better on Twitter or snarking amongst friends. We don't do that. Well, there's the issue of if you let the talk time go longer, you get a higher fraction of women. But I think that also affects the type of Q&A or discussion time you can have. Right. She's a seamless cat. The question that people have asked is, you know, why are you cutting off comments? Because you're cutting off the chance to have a good discussion. These people are provoking discussion. But in a two to five minute Q&A section, how much of a discussion are we having? Or is it just a couple of people standing up across the lecture hall with microphones and saying things at each other? I go back to this idea of what the Q&A is for. Obviously it's for points of clarification. After my last Cool Stars talk, several senior people did raise their hand and say, have you considered that this might be an effect on your data? Right. And I went, no I haven't, but let's talk about it afterwards. A discussion is a two-way street, and you can't have a two-way street in front of 500 people like that. Some people can, but I also know that others can't, right? If there was a grad student who gave a talk, who was clearly just blindsided by all the questions, and I bet that if he'd been somewhere in his element, he probably, presumably, would have been fine with at least some of those questions, right? Often the comment during the talk is, again, as I phrase it, to like draw attention to the commenter. Like I know double AS has the session chair breakfasts, so I don't know if there's some way at Cool Stars, because clearly the SOC here has been on board with a lot of these changes. I'm sitting down with the session chairs and saying, hey, this is why, this is our motivation, here's some guidelines we want you to follow, maybe practicing interrupting people, because I think that's a thing that, especially before the first time, doing those kinds of interventions takes practice. And so if you, spitting out the words the first time I know from experience is really hard. What about the structure, the dynamics of how we ask the questions? So at double AS sometimes it's, there is a microphone in the middle of the room, please line up. It can be very good for certain rooms, for certain audiences, but I don't think that's usually good for three minutes. Worse for mobility-challenged people, and I think also people with anxieties sometimes. You can just stand there waiting in line, going like, God, oh God. It's too much time to think. Just get spooked. On the other hand, a very big room, mic running is good, but mic running can be hard. Very often the dictatorial control of the moderator is saying, it's in the back, and then you, and then you. And then that becomes like, dude, dude, dude. Yeah. One way we've done it, and we did this for part of my splinter, was any questions, and then just let people raise their hands and let the old people like, wave their hands back, and then be like, uh, yes ma'am.