34 Scientific American, April 2022

S

ome years ago I made up a lIst of thIngs I was tIred of readIng

in profiles of women scientists: how she was the first woman to be

hired, say, or to lead a group, or to win some important prize. I had

just been assigned a profile of a splendid woman astronomer, and

her “firsts” said nothing about the woman and everything about the

culture of astronomy: a hierarchy in which the highest ranks have

historically included only scientists who are male, white and pro-

tective of their prerogatives. My list evolved into the “Finkbeiner test,” and to abide by it, I pre-

tended we had suddenly leaped into a new world in which gender was irrelevant and could be

ignored. I would treat the person I was interviewing like she was just an astronomer.

Later, working on another story, I started hearing about a

cohort of young women astronomers who were the ones to call

if I wanted to talk to the field’s best. If the top of the scientific

hierarchy now included large numbers of women, I wondered

whether they might live in a post–Finkbeiner test world—that is,

whether they were just astronomers, not “women astronomers.”

I turned out to be 180 degrees wrong. True, they are at the top,

but they are outspokenly women astronomers, and they are

remaking astronomy.

Earlier generations of women had worked against the restric-

tions of the hierarchical culture, but change was glacially grad-

ual, partly because the women were few. With time, however,

small changes in their numbers added up and then tipped over,

creating a different world. This recent cohort of women, who

earned doctoral degrees around 2010, wins prizes, fellowships

and faculty positions; does not suffer foolishness; and goes out-

side the established rules to make its own. “We create the cul-

ture we want,” says Heather Knutson, who won the Annie Jump

Cannon Award in 2013. She is a full professor at the California

Institute of Technology and studies the properties of exoplanets.

“There are more of us now, and we have the power to shape it.”

One of the rules of their world is that it includes not only

women but also people who have been marginalized for other

reasons, that is, people of color, disabled people, LGBTQ+ peo-

ple and those who are nonbinary—people whose numbers in the

field are still strikingly unrepresentative.

These women astronomers are scientifically and culturally ambi-

tious, and they shine of their own light; they sparkle. Their world

still has restrictions but not as many, and the women react to them

more defiantly. “We don’t want to change ourselves to fit the mold,”

says Ekta Patel, a Miller postdoctoral fellow at the University of

California, Berkeley, who simulates the behavior of satellite gal-

axies. “I enjoy being a girl,” says Lia Medeiros, a National Science

Foundation postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Advanced

Study in Princeton, N.J., where she studies black holes. “And I’m

going to be a girl all over their physics. This is my world, too.”

women have been astronomers since forever, but they have

needed to be made of iron. Vera C. Rubin, who got her Ph.D. in

1954, was advised in school to stay away from science. She kept

going anyway by telling herself she was just different from other

people. She did her graduate studies where her husband’s job

took them, raised children and then got a position where she was

the only woman. She discovered the first solid evidence of the

dark matter that, years later, is still one of cosmology’s biggest

mysteries. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences

(NAS), won the National Medal of Science and, after she died in

2016, had an ambitious observatory named after her; one of its

missions is to map dark matter.

Back in 1965, Rubin confronted the Hale Telescope’s no-

women-allowed rule, ostensibly imposed because observing is an

all-night process and the observatory had no ladies’ room. Rubin

Ann Finkbeiner is a science writer based in Baltimore. She

specializes in writing about astronomy and cosmology, grief,

and the intersection of science and national security. She is

co-proprietor of the science blog The Last Word on Nothing.