Committees

Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy

On this page, the AAS Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy celebrates its history, as compiled by CSWA Chair Joan Schmelz* with assistance from several current and past committee members. Links to the longer documents are provided.

Here are some published documents relevant to our history. The first three are the same as those linked to in the list of milestones, above.

  • "Report to the Council of the AAS from the Working Group on the Status of Women in Astronomy - 1973" (Cowley, A. et al. 1974, BAAS6, 413; PDF, 2.0 MB; complete version. As found in the ADS, this paper is missing its last page. We have inserted the last page from a reprint copy in our files.)
  • "Report of the Committee on the Status of Women: American Astronomical Society" (Liller, M. et al. 1980, BAAS12, 624; PDF, 1.7 MB)
  • "Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy" (Simkin, S. 1999, in The American Astronomical Society's First Century, American Institute of Physics/Springer Verlag, ed. David DeVorkin)
  • "Celebrating 30 Years of Advancing the Status of Women in Astronomy: The AAS Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy" (C. E. Simpson et al., in Women in Astronomy and Space Science: Meeting the Challenges of an Increasingly Diverse Workforce, Proceedings from the conference held at The Inn and Conference Center University of Maryland University College, October 21—23, 2009, edited by Anne L. Kinney, Diana Khachadourian, Pamela S. Millar and Colleen N. Hartman, p. 272)
  • "How We Got from Then (1971 ) to Now --- The Annie Jump Cannon Award and the First Working Group on the Status of Women in Astronomy," slides from a presentation by Roberta M. Humphreys, CSWA Special Session at the 231st Meeting of the AAS, Washington, DC, 2:00 PM Thursday, 11 January 2018

*The CSWA History page is dedicated to the memory of Joan Schmelz's mom, Elizabeth “Betty” Schmelz, a lover of history and, for many years, the director of the Bergenfield Museum Society of Bergenfield, NJ.