gender gap in science, take two

At coffee today I counted the faces around the table and realized there was a huge gender imbalance. There were fifteen women there and only five men. If you count all of the academics (i.e. leave out the support staff, who are all male, but count faculty, postdocs, graduate and undergrad students) who work in this building (three research groups), there are 16 men and 20 women. If you count only the people under 40, we're even more woman-dominated.

This is something of an anomaly. Another group at another lab, the one I'm considering working with when I start my post-doc, has only two women, a grad student and an undergrad, among 16. But it's not completely unheard-of. Nuclear physics and astronomy have historically had higher proportions of women than many other sub-fields in physics.

Still, pretty cool, eh? And even cooler, of course, is the fact that most of the women in my lab are smokin'-hot babes. Who says all scientists are homely and geeky?