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A. National Perspectives

Women in Astronomy

C. M. Urry, L. Danly, L. E. Sherbert, S. Gonzaga


Scientic Contribution of Women in Soviet Radio astronomy

127

SCIENTIFIC CONTRIBUTION OF WOMEN IN SOVIET RADIO ASTRONOMY DURING THE LAST 12 YEARS
Tatiana Smirnova

It is very dicult to estimate the scientic contribution of any research in any scientic domain. The real scientic value of published scientic results usually becomes apparent after 10 years or so. This is why in this work we used a formal approach to estimate the scientic contribution of women in Radio Astronomy during a denite time period. To this end I used the Proceedings of the All-Union conferences on Galactic and Extragalactic Radio Astronomy1 2 3 4 which are held every four years in the (now nonexistent) Soviet Union, and which have represented all the radio astronomy scientic orientations. I have analyzed this information for the period 1979{1991. I have paid special attention to the relative quantity of papers presented by women and by men to determine the eectiveness of the work of women in radio astronomy. In Fig. 1 I show as function of time (years 1979{1991) the total number of women presenting contributions (dotted line) and the relative number of women to men presenting contributions in % (solid line). We can see that the number of women actively working in radio astronomy changes from 16 to 25, and their ratio relative to men varies in the 10.4% to 14.4% range for dierent years. There is no obvious tendency showing an increase or decrease of women engaged in this scientic discipline.
;;;

Figure 1. Total numb er of women (N) engaged in radio astronomy in our country for the period 1979{ 1991 (dotted line); ratio (R) of the number of women to the number of men expressed in percent (solid line).

Even if in radio astronomy there is a whole series of scientic orientations, because of the small number of women engaged in radio astronomy, I have divided the eld in two orientations only: galactic (G) and extragalactic (E) radio astronomy. These two orientations include between them all possible scientic radio astronomical orientations. In Fig. 2 I show the total number of papers presented by women engaged in galactic radio astronomy (G), and extragalactic radio astronomy (E) as a function of time. We can see that during the years 1979{1987 the ratio of women engaged in galactic to the number engaged in extragalactic radio astronomy was within the range 4.6 to 2.1, but that in 1991 this ratio became close to 1. It is to be noted that the interest of women towards extragalactic radio astronomy is constantly increasing, whereas the interest
Women in Astronomy C. M. Urry, L. Danly, L. E. Sherbert, S. Gonzaga


128

Tatiana Smirnova

in galactic radio astronomy has declined abruptly from 1987 to 1991. The number of men engaged in galactic versus extragalactic radio astronomy was also in the 3-to-1.6 range for the years 1979 to 1987, and for 1991 this ratio has again increased to 2.7. In Fig. 3 I show the relative number of papers by women to the number of papers by men in extragalactic and galactic radio astonomy as function of time. Fig. 3 re ects the tendencies I discussed before, from 1983 to 1991 a strong increase (3 times) of the ratio of papers contributed by women to that of men is noted for extragalactic radio astronomy.

Number of papers presented by women in galactic radio astronomy (G), and extragalactic radio astronomy (E).
Figure 2.

Figure 3. Ratio of the number of papers presented by women to that by men in extragalactic (E) and in galactic (G) radio astronomy in percent.

In Fig. 4 I show the eciency of scientic research work of men and women during the last 12 years. The eciency was dened to be the average of the number of papers per person in one year. Fig. 4 shows that the eciency is approximately the same for men and women, and it's average for the considered period of time was 1.79 for women, and 1.83 for men. It is extraordinary that in spite of a substantially larger workload in the family life (children, housework, shopping) women's eciency is not worse than that of men. It is possible that if the home workload of women, which is particularly heavy in our country due to the absence of many worksaving devices, is decreased the eciency of woman's work will increase and become higher than that of men. At least the potential for such an improvement exists.
Women in Astronomy C. M. Urry, L. Danly, L. E. Sherbert, S. Gonzaga


Scientic Contribution of Women in Soviet Radio astronomy

129

Figure 4. Average presented papers per year by men (M) and (W) in the 1979{1991 val.

number of person per by women time inter-

ENDNOTES

1 2 3 4

XII Galactic and Extragalactic Radio Astronomy Conference Proceedings, 1979, Moscow. XV Galactic and Extragalactic Radio Astronomy Conference Proceedings, 1983, Kharkov. XIX Galactic and Extragalactic Radio Astronomy Conference Proceedings, 1987, Tallin. XXIII Galactic and Extragalactic Radio Astronomy Conference Proceedings, 1991, Ashhabad.

Tatiana Smirnova: Astro Space Center, Lebedev Physics Institute, Russia

Women in Astronomy

C. M. Urry, L. Danly, L. E. Sherbert, S. Gonzaga