Paper 13098-17
Paper 13098-17
Impact of dual anonymous peer review on ESO telescope time allocations
18 June 2024 • 10:50 - 11:10 Japan Standard Time | Room G316, North - 3F
Abstract
In the last decade, some detailed analyses of peer-review systems applied to the evaluation of observing proposals, showed that the outcome of these review processes were affected by significant biases, especially gender and nationality biases. Dual anonymous evaluations were identified as an important step to correct for the observed discrimination.
Among the several improvements recently implemented in the front-end of ESO operational model (the so-called Phase1 segment, that includes the preparation, submission and evaluation of observing proposals), we have now been running dual anonymous reviews since a few years.
In this talk, we will present the first results of our analysis that compares observing proposal success rates before and after the introduction of dual anonymous reviews, in order to evaluate the impact that this approach has had on the outcome of the process.
Presenter
European Southern Observatory (Germany)
Full Astronomer at ESO, where she has had different roles, first in the User Support Department and since 2015 in the Observing Programmes Office, where she is responsible for the Observing Programmes Committee (ESO’s peer review scheme) and for the Phase 1 upgrade project. She is also well-known for her commitment and active engagement in the promotion of women in astronomy and against gender biases in STEM. She has chaired the IAU Working Group on Women in Astronomy, she has been a member of the ISC project “The Gender Gap in the Natural Sciences”, she has completed and released the Astro Voices project, and she is the inaugural recipient of the Nancy Grace Roman Award (2023), from the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. Science-wise, she is an observational astrophysicist interested in unraveling the formation and evolution of the Milky Way and its satellite galaxies via their chemical histories and has chaired the ESO Faculty for two consecutive terms.