Short Wave - Fighting Bias In Space: When There's A New Telescope, Who Gets To Use It?

Episode Date: January 21, 2022

The James Webb Space Telescope's mirrors are almost in place and soon it'll be a million miles away from Earth, ready to provide clues to the history of the universe. Naturally, many scientists have research they'd like to do that involve the telescope. Today on the show, Emily talks with correspondent Nell Greenfieldboyce about who gets time on it, and how decision-makers are working to stay focused on the proposed science instead of who will be doing it, in the hopes of making the process fair for all proposals.For more of Nell's reporting, check out, Who gets to use NASA's James Webb Space Telescope? Astronomers work to fight bias. (https://n.pr/3tH2vwJ)You can email Short Wave at [e-mail] pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, Emily. Hey, Nell. I don't know about you, but listen, I have been following the saga of the James Webb Space Telescope with great joy. Remember, it launched on Christmas Day, and then it unfolded that tricky silver sunshield the size of a tennis court. Yeah, I l-oled pretty hard when the James Webb Space Telescope Twitter account blocked the Twitter accounts representing the sun. And the moon, like mirroring what was happening in real life, how the sun shield blocks heat and light. Anyway, it was kind of nerdy. Did they actually block them or were they just like, I saw a lot of trash talk, but.

No, no, no, they actually blocked them. Millennials have taken over the James Webb Twitter account, I assume. Well, I mean, the telescope was in the works for like two decades. So they had plenty of time to plan their social media campaign. They've been scheduling these tweets for years. So this telescope, it's the most powerful one ever put into space. even more powerful than our beloved Hubble. It will take months before it's in full operation, but there's already a long line of astronomers clamoring to use it. You know it. I mean, even before it launched, the first call for research proposals drew in more than 1,100

from like 44 different countries. Jane Rigby is at NASA. She's the Telescope's Operations Project Scientist. So the web science program for the first year, we are going to be doing more than 300 different science programs. that were submitted by researchers from all over the globe. It was a cutthroat competition. We rejected three quarters of all the accepted proposals.

And we're taking the top-ranked quarter. But even if the competition was fierce, the astronomers running this selection process did a lot of work to make sure it was as fair as possible. What do you mean? Well, they had some experiences with the Hubble Space Telescope that made them worry about implicit biases and prejudices that might creep in. when research proposals were being reviewed and ranked. Stuff like, you know, sexism. We don't like that. Sexism and all these things are pervasive problems in the sciences.

Yeah, like everywhere else. But the Space Telescope people have really been working on this in recent years, and they've made some changes that seem to have had a real impact in terms of ensuring there's equal consideration given to proposals for both female scientists and people who've never used space telescopes before. And what they've done is affecting both how observing time on the James Webb Space Telescope will be doled out and time on other NASA space telescopes. Cool.

Actually, the results they're getting are even drawing attention from people who are in different scientific fields. Okay. Today on the show, who gets to use NASA's fancy new telescope is a question of fairness, how astronomers have been working to keep decision makers focused on the proposed science, and not who will be doing that science. This is Shortwave, the Daily Science Podcast from NPR. All right, now let's say I want to use a space telescope. Can I just make a proposal? Basically, yeah.

I mean, NASA wants to do the best, most promising science, you know, get the best bang for its buck with these telescopes that it's put in space. And astronomer Neil Reid told me the agency isn't picky about where good ideas come from. Anyone from across the world can lead a proposal, can be on a proposal. Australia, China, Japan, Russia, you know, anywhere, you can put in a proposal to use other Hubble or JWST. JWST being the brand new James Webb Space Telescope, obviously. Cool, cool. And what kinds of things are they looking for in a proposal? Well, you know, I mean, they want something that's not just like somebody's hobby,

but some kind of science that's going to push the field forward, you know, answer a longstanding question or open new avenues of research or maybe just be like a cool new idea for something to look at or looking at in a way that's never been tried before. Okay, okay. So the proposals, they come in and what? They convene like a committee of experts to review the proposals and rank them? Yeah. And so that's all managed by the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore where Reed works.

It's long managed proposals for Hubble and now it's doing the same thing for James Webb. And about a decade ago, someone asked Reed, do you know if the acceptance rate for Hubble proposals that are led by women is any different than the acceptance rate for proposals led by men? We didn't at that point because we don't actually collect that information. So they couldn't answer that question because they didn't ask submitters for demographic info like gender or race? Exactly, yeah. And so what Reid did is he went and gathered the names of people who had proposed and people whose proposals got accepted. And then he did just kind of the best study he could.

You know, he had to make assumptions about gender based on the name of the lead scientist or principal investigator, you know, the PI. I'm not super down with people guessing people's gender identity. Okay, Reid knew that. He knew that this was not perfect. But he was just trying to do a quick check with what he had. And we came up with this answer that there was this systematic difference. Every cycle that we looked at, proposals led by male PIs did better than. proposals led by female PIs.

Okay, what's a cycle in proposal speak? You know, it's like a call out for proposals and deciding which proposals go ahead. You know, it roughly correlates to a year, you know, once a year, more or less. And this difference between men and women was there in every cycle they checked. Reed says what really struck him

was this consistency. I mean, proposals by men always had a higher acceptance rate. You know, it was like 14 cycles, I think. Everything was the same way around. So it's like taking a penny and tossing it 14 times and getting heads every time you think, there's something going on here. So he and his colleagues were like, we should do something. Yeah, no, that's not how pennies work.

What did they do? Well, you know, at first they thought, we're scientists, we can solve this. So they tried a couple of things, you know. The lead scientist's name had typically been on the front page of proposals in big letters. So they tried, you know, putting it on the second page. And that didn't do anything. They tried using initials instead of names. And again, there was no effect.

And we got sensible and we said, let's actually talk to some experts in social sciences because they can understand this better than we do. So who did they talk to? They reached out to a consultant named Stephanie Johnson. She's at the University of Colorado. And, you know, she was working with her then student, Jessica Kirk, who's now at the University of Memphis. And they came in and just took a fresh look at the whole selection and review process, the whole kitten caboodle. They sat in on the committees that discussed proposals. And Stephanie Johnson says they noticed something right away.

A lot of the discussion, like half of it, was not about scientific issues, but about people. Sometimes when a proposal, like, there might be a question about it. Like, oh, you know, this seems, this seems really good. But can they actually do this? Like, are they sure? A lot of times there's someone who will speak up in the room and say, you know, I know this person. they will figure it out because that's who they are. I see. So the biases of the committee were like creeping into the process.

Well, I mean, nobody really knows, right? I mean, you know, Neil Reed told me he didn't like to talk about biases because that assumes that he knows what was going wrong to create this gender gap difference, even though he said, you know, it's probably biases. But, you know, when you have these kind of like personal, subjective discussions about people who you know, what you think about people, like. Like it just, you know, it means that some people might get extra consideration. Some people might get just sort of more of a pass than somebody else might.

So what did the social scientists think should be done about all of this? So they recommended going to a completely anonymous process. So no names on the proposals at all. And not only that, scientists would be instructed to write their proposals in a way that made it basically impossible to know who was behind it. So, for example, you know, they wouldn't use phrases like, as our past results show, you know, because that could indicate who it is. But rather, they should just cite the relevant scientific reference, like the journal article, more neutrally, like by last name and date, rather than using words like hour or my or that kind of thing. Okay.

And how is this proposed change received by the astronomy community? I put that question to Lou Strolger. He also works at the Space Telescope Science Institute. He chaired their working group on anonymous proposing. and he said they solicited feedback to kind of gauge people's feelings. There were a lot of people that were for it. But I'm guessing that some people were against it. Oh, you know it. Strolger told me they had objections.

They ranged from, you know, this will totally upset how good science is done to, you know, you'll basically fool yourself into giving time to people who don't know what they're doing, and all sorts of things. And he told me, you know, there were trends. in, you know, those, who those responses tended to be from, younger people and women were more likely to be for it. So the scientific community was split on this, but I'm guessing since we are talking about it, that they forged ahead. Yep. So in 2018, they had their first completely anonymous proposal selection for time on Hubble. Priya Natarajan is an astrophysicist at Yale University.

She chaired the process. You know, everyone was a little nervous. She told me, you know, sometimes someone would slip and sort of start to guess who was behind a proposal, maybe like name some names. But the buy-in from the community was so tremendous that there would be other people on the panels who would say, oh, no, no, no, come on, let's stick to the science. She thought the whole tenor of the discussion was richer and more scientifically interesting as a result. Yeah. It's very cool to hear Priya Natarajan involved with this. She has been on our show before.

So what were the results of all of this work? Did making everything anonymous make a difference in whose proposals ultimately got through? Well, I'll let Lou Strolger tell you. For the very first time, female PIs outperformed male PIs. The performance, the acceptance rates flipped. Boom. All right. So the proposals led by women had a higher acceptance rate. That's kind of an amazing change after so many years of it being the other way around. Yeah, Priya Natarajan told me she thought it would help, but not that quick. I was stunned that there was an effect right away. That's wild. Now, I think you said that this all went down in 2018, right?

Right. And since then, what's happened? Well, men have outperformed women over the last few cycles for Hubble proposals, but the gap is much smaller than it was. And astronomers have seen other signs that this approach is working to increase fairness. Lou Strulger told me the number of first-time telescope users, people who have never used Hubble before, has skyrocketed. It went from something like a dozen per year to 50 per year. That's amazing.

And now, what about all those concerns that telescope time would go to posers who didn't know what they were doing? That just hasn't been an issue at all. Lou Strulger told me that when proposal reviewers finally found out who was behind, to the approved proposals. No one ever objected that like these people weren't up to the job, you know, but he says they were sometimes surprised. There were some, you know, oh, that was not at all who I thought it was, that sort of reactions. That sounds like unconscious bias. We started this conversation talking about the James Webb Space Telescope, JWST. And I am assuming and hoping, actually, this same process will be used for that. Exactly. Yeah. NASA's leadership

looked at the results from this experience with Hubble, and they recently said, okay, we should do this for our other space telescopes and science missions. So, you know, like a half a dozen telescopes. And even though there's just been one round of selection so far for the James Webb Space Telescope, the initial numbers look promising. Like proposals led by men had a higher success rate for smaller projects,

but for the big projects, it was the opposite with women-led proposals doing better. And you mentioned that other fields of science outside astronomy or taking note of this process? Lou Strolger told me he'd been surprised to get calls from places like particle accelerators, and even from the Australian national government, which wanted to redo how it allocates science grants. That is a, you know, that's a great, humbling moment when national governments are asking

you how you did this. But he says there's still a lot of work to do. I mean, they don't know about other potential biases. They're trying to find ways of collecting demographic data so they're trying to find ways of collecting demographic data, so they can track that. And then, you know, there's all kinds of other things that go into who even submits a proposal for telescope time, like what jobs people get and what mentors they have. I get what you mean, no.

This isn't a panacea, but it's still chipping away at something really important. Like, who gets to stare out at the universe with the most powerful telescope from planet Earth? So thanks for bringing us this tale of striving for more fairness there. Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure. This episode was produced by Thomas Liu, edited by Giselle Grayson and fact-checked by Catherine Seifer. Catherine, we're so glad you're interning with us this spring. Welcome, welcome to the team. The audio engineer for this episode was Stu Rushfield.

I'm Emily Kwong, and you've been listening to Shortwave, the Daily Science podcast from NPR.