Planck: Demographics and Diversity

Another aspect of Planck’s legacy bears examining.

A couple of months ago, the 2018 Gruber Prize in Cosmology was awarded to the Planck Satellite. This was (I think) a well-deserved honour for all of us who have worked on Planck during the more than 20 years since its conception, for a mission which confirmed a standard model of cosmology and measured the parameters which describe it to accuracies of a few percent. Planck is the latest in a series of telescopes and satellites dating back to the COBE Satellite in the early 90s, through the MAXIMA and Boomerang balloons (among many others) around the turn of the 21st century, and the WMAP Satellite (The Gruber Foundation seems to like CMB satellites: COBE won the Prize in 2006 and WMAP in 2012).

Well, it wasn’t really awarded to the Planck Satellite itself, of course: 50% of the half-million-dollar award went to the Principal Investigators of the two Planck instruments, Jean-Loup Puget and Reno Mandolesi, and the other half to the “Planck Team”. The Gruber site officially mentions 334 members of the Collaboration as recipients of the Prize.

Unfortunately, the Gruber Foundation apparently has some convoluted rules about how it makes such group awards, and the PIs were not allowed to split the monetary portion of the prize among the full 300-plus team. Instead, they decided to share the second half of the funds amongst “43 identified members made up of the Planck Science Team, key members of the Planck editorial board, and Co-Investigators of the two instruments.” Those words were originally on the Gruber site but in fact have since been removed — there is no public recognition of this aspect of the award, which is completely appropriate as it is the whole team who deserves the award. (Full disclosure: as a member of the Planck Editorial Board and a Co-Investigator, I am one of that smaller group of 43, chosen not entirely transparently by the PIs.)

I also understand that the PIs will use a portion of their award to create a fund for all members of the collaboration to draw on for Planck-related travel over the coming years, now that there is little or no governmental funding remaining for Planck work, and those of us who will also receive a financial portion of the award will also be encouraged to do so (after, unfortunately, having to work out the tax implications of both receiving the prize and donating it back).

This seems like a reasonable way to handle a problem with no real fair solution, although, as usual in large collaborations like Planck, the communications about this left many Planck collaborators in the dark. (Planck also won the Royal Society 2018 Group Achievement Award which, because there is no money involved, could be uncontroversially awarded to the ESA Planck Team, without an explicit list. And the situation is much better than for the Nobel Prize.)

However, this seemingly reasonable solution reveals an even bigger, longer-standing, and wider-ranging problem: only about 50 of the 334 names on the full Planck team list (roughly 15%) are women. This is already appallingly low. Worse still, none of the 43 formerly “identified” members officially receiving a monetary prize are women (although we would have expected about 6 given even that terrible fraction). Put more explicitly, there is not a single woman in the upper reaches of Planck scientific management.

This terrible situation was also noted by my colleague Jean-Luc Starck (one of the larger group of 334) and Olivier Berné. As a slight corrective to this, it was refreshing to see Nature’s take on the end of Planck dominated by interviews with young members of the collaboration including several women who will, we hope, be dominating the field over the coming years and decades.