A crowd gathers as John and Scott speak in front of a model of NASA's James Webb Space Telescope at South by Southwest.
Alex Evers.
The scientists who eventually get to peer out at the universe with NASA's powerful new James Webb Space Telescope will be the lucky ones whose research proposals made it through a highly competitive selection process.
Thanks to lessons learned from another famous NASA observatory, those that didn't make the cut this time can at least know that they got a fair shot.
The selection process was designed to reduce unconscious biases by forcing decision-makers to focus on the scientific merit of a proposal rather than who submitted it.
They look at every proposal. They read them. They don't know who wrote them, according to a scientist with the James Webb Space Telescope. The proposals are evaluated in a way that makes it impossible to see the science.
This is a new way to give out observing time on space telescopes. After years of hard work by Astronomers, a change came about that gave everyone the same consideration when using the Hubble Space Telescope.
The winner of telescope time has a bias.
The first clue was when Iain He is the associate director of science at the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is the science operations center for both Hubble and now Webb.
His results were quite shocking. The acceptance rate for proposals led by women was lower than those led by men. He analyzed the discrepancy for more than a dozen years.
"I was surprised at how consistent it was," says Reid. There was a systematic effect.
The "blinded" proposal review process was developed by him and his colleagues to try to fix this. The measure was initially opposed by a lot of the astronomy community, but the evidence shows that it is working to level the playing field.
NASA wants to devote its time to the most promising science since any telescope in space is a rare, precious resource. There is so much demand that the majority of ideas have to be rejected.
The first call-out for proposals required 24,500 hours of observing time, even before the James Webb Space Telescope was launched. Only 6,000 hours were available.
It was a very competitive competition. The operations project scientist for the new telescope at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center says that they rejected three-quarters of all the proposals.
Astronomers still clamor to use Hubble more than 30 years after it was launched. They submit a lot of proposals every year.
Only the top 20% of proposals will make it to the telescope in time.
The focus should be on the science, not the scientists.
After showing a gender discrepancy in acceptance rates for Hubble proposals, he and his colleagues tried different solutions. They tried to put the lead scientist's name on the second page instead of the front page. They tried using initials. Nothing worked.
"Then 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,'" says Reid.
They reached out to the University of Colorado and their former student, Jessica Kirk, now at the University of Memphis. They sat in on the meetings that ranked the proposals. They noticed that a lot of the time, the discussion was centered on who submitted the proposal.
"There might be a question about it, like, 'Oh, you know, this seems really good but can they actually do this?'" recalls Johnson. Someone will speak up in the room and say, "I know this person, they will figure it out."
Kirk says that there is an evaluation of both the science and the research.
Astronomers who were established and well-known got an extra leg up.
"They were getting a pass", says Reid. They had a lower bar to overcome than the scientists who were fresh out of school.
The artist's conception shows what the James Webb Space Telescope looks like in space now that all of its main components are deployed.
The NASA Animator is Adriana Manrique Gutierrez.
The review process should be completely blind and anonymous. The evaluation committees wouldn't get to see any names, and all proposals would have to be written in a way that made it impossible to know who the proposal was from.
Some doubted the system would work.
The astronomy community was surveyed by the institute to see what they thought of the change.
Lou Strolger, deputy head of the instruments division at the Space Telescope Science Institute and chair of its working group on anonymous proposing, says the knee-jerk reaction was pretty polar.
He says that half of the people who responded favored the idea, and that most of them were women or people who were young.
He says that they thought it would be a good way to encourage new people to participate.
Lots of people had objections.
"They ranged from 'This will totally upset how good science is done' to 'You'll basically fool yourself into giving time to people who don't know what they're doing'," recalls Strolger.
The institute's director gave the go-ahead, despite the fact that they were still moving forward. Astronomers did their first truly anonymous review of Hubble proposals. A theoretical astrophysicist at Yale University chaired the process. Someone would try to guess who submitted the proposal.
She says that the community buy-in was so great that other people on the panels would say, "Oh no, no, come on, let's stick to the science."
I was shocked.
The impact of sticking to the science was real. The acceptance rate for proposals led by women was higher than for proposals led by men. The gender difference had changed.
Natarajan says he was stunned. There was an effect right away.
Strolger says that they never objected to the person being up to the job, even though they were often surprised.
Strolger says there were a lot of people who thought it was not them.
Data from the last few years shows that this process continues to help close the gap between men and women in acceptance rates for Hubble proposals, and it may have improved fairness in other ways.
Strolger says there has been a rise in approvals for people who have never used Hubble. It went from 12 to 50 per year.
The first round of proposals shows a much closer gap in male and female acceptance rates.
"This seems to be working, and it seems to be working as we anticipated it would."
Telescope users could be affected by other biases.
Anonymizing everything doesn't solve all the problems in making sure everyone has equal access, says Johnson, who notes that unconscious bias can affect who in astronomy gets advantages like mentors and job opportunities.
It's not perfect. She doesn't know of the impact of dual-anonymization on creating racial equity. It did seem to lift some of the gender bias.
The Space Telescope Science Institute has historically not gathered demographic information about those who submit research proposals.
Strolger says that they are not allowed to collect that information.
The best he could do was to make assumptions about gender based on the scientist's name or knowledge of people in the field.
The researchers are looking for ways to learn more about submitters by allowing them to voluntarily or anonymously give information about themselves to a third party.
"We hope that by giving ways in which we can get access to more demographic data, we can begin to see where other biases may lie," says Strolger.
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