inclusiveness

AMS on the Air Podcast: Alexandra Cranford Talks about Women in TV Meteorology

The largest biographical study to date of TV meteorologists shows some disturbing disadvantages for women in the profession.  You can hear Alexandra Cranford, the author of that study, discuss the study on the latest episode of our podcast, AMS on the Air.
Cranford, who is an AMS Certified Broadcaster with WWL-TV in New Orleans, made an exhaustive survey of online information for more than 2,000 weathercasters. She focused on the relation between her colleagues’ professional status and education. The results, which formed the basis of her BAMS article, show women meteorologists have made gains on local TV, yet are not proportionately well represented in the most prominent and prized positions on local stations.
For example, women are much more likely to be on TV during daytime, mornings, and weekends, than on prime time slots:
CranfordChart
And they are far less likely to be chief meteorologist for their station:
CranfordChart2
In the podcast interview, she speculates on some of the reasons for these findings.

Perhaps when a hiring manager is interviewing a man versus a woman as a weathercaster, they are looking at slightly different criteria….Another thing is, maybe women are choosing for some reason…perhaps to work maybe weekends and mornings. Maybe women are staying away from those chief positions for some reason. I have no idea if this is the case—I’m just throwing out ideas here—but…possibly due to family reasons or personal preference. That could maybe be another thing.
Also, women may choose to exit the industry earlier in their careers, so that leaves a pool of mainly older, more experienced, mainly males to fill those chief spots, which are typically filled by an older, more experienced person.
And then, one of the reviewers of my study brought my attention to the effect that all of us think about—but how much of a real effect might it have?—the effects of criticisms of consultants and social media and so forth. We all know about the internet trolls. Anyone who works as a TV weathercaster, I’m sure has gotten emails from viewers….That’s a very real thing too. There is research that suggests maybe that’s a bit worse for females versus males. Maybe that can play a role as well.

Listen to the whole interview on the AMS website or on your favorite podcast app.

The AMS Annual Meeting: Always a Need to Hear the Unheard

You’ve been here before. Those previous AMS Annual Meetings, for example, right here in Phoenix. You probably have some good memories of those. But this is not the sense of déjà vu we’re talking about.
Meteorologists, and indeed scientists of many disciplines, bridge the road from societal impacts to societal progress. As a result, you’ve been in this place before: “place” in the sense of what you study, what you say, and what you accomplish. It is all predicated on the premise that the most important people in the room are the people who are not, actually, in the room. The people who flee hurricanes and tsunamis, who dig out from snow and put out wildfires, whose coral reefs are blanching—they are notably absent from conference rooms and auditoriums as well as from laboratories, classrooms, and forecast offices. Yet in the places the work of these atmospheric and related sciences goes on, these unheard voices are the pleas that are being answered.
Science is a process of voices participating in discussions across many divides. Published papers in AMS journals spread ideas from many corners of the globe, just as our Annual Meeting brings together people and their findings from across borders.
As with international borders, so too with generational borders. Discussions in Phoenix this year originate from people who were once among us, but whose voices are now silenced. You can be sure that, as much as it hurts to lose a pioneering scientist such as, say, Doug Lilly, who died this past year, his voice is still very much in the room here due to all his students and all the people influenced by his work. In fact, anyone who takes advantage of opportunities to mentor other scientists is ensuring her voice will be in many rooms she’s never entered. This is the power of a collective enterprise such as AMS.
While answering the unheard is a specialty for this community, now we are about to get even better at it. First, we greatly miss our colleagues and friends from the Federal government who unfortunately must miss this AMS Annual Meeting. The opportunities of the week are reserved for the vast majority who made it to Phoenix as planned. But remember that we are used to speaking as best we can for voices of the missing. The voice we raise, and the waves we make, will undoubtedly be all the stronger if those who aren’t here are not forgotten.
But second, and ultimately more significantly, we will get better at including the voice of the unheard–by including them in the room. One of the great strengths of AMS president Roger Wakimoto’s theme this week is directly related to this chronic condition of sciences so intimately tied to societal need: “Understanding and Building Resilience to Extreme Events by Being Interdisciplinary, International, and Inclusive.”
That last of three “I’s” is telling. Inclusiveness promotes many voices by giving people a seat at the table. No longer can AMS represent every voice by assuming that the few can speak for the many. Inclusiveness is a theme of this meeting, of this year in AMS initiatives, and a pillar of AMS Centennial activities moving forward. For example, this year’s Inez Fung Symposium includes a panel on Tuesday on “Fostering Diverse Perspectives in Climate Science.”
This year’s meeting will be a success, all the more because you’re accustomed to acting like a typical meteorologist, listening to the people who can’t be, or haven’t typically been, in the room.