In past posts I have mentioned that females at Fermilab are less likely to be allowed to participate in "glory" analyses than their white male peers. Today, I'll back that up with some hard facts.
I was a collaborator on an experiment at Fermilab between 2000 and 2005. There are over 660 named collaborators on the experiment, of which nearly 500 are white male, around 90 are female, and around 110 are non-whites.
If we only look at people from US institutes (because I am certain Title IX applies to them), we find that there are around 340 people, 70% of whom are white male, around 15% are female, and around 20% are non-white.
The experiment has weekly "all hands are expected to attend" meetings wherein detector and data quality issues are discussed, and important physics analyses on the experiment are showcased to the collaboration members. The meetings usually consist of an average of around three presentations, pretty much equally divided between the detector and physics analysis presentations.
It is a big deal to be allowed to give one of these presentations, since it gives you face time to all the hundreds of other people on the experiment, and most importantly, it showcases your work to those people. Not just anyone can give such a presentation...you have to be chosen by the upper adminstration of the experiment to do so. Getting allotted such a presentation is a nice career advancement perk.
The experiment posts all agendas of these meetings, starting continuously in November 2003. This evening Absinthe picked through the agendas of every single meeting and looked at who gave the presentations. This information this study is based on is public...anyone who knows where to look can do this kind of analysis (with enough patience).
The results?
Since November 2003 there have been a total of around 220 "all hands" presentations given by US physicists. around 12% were given by females (should have been 15%), and 10% were given by non-whites (should have been 20%). Thus we find that females and non-whites are cheated out of 20% to 50% of their fair share of presentations. As I have mentioned before in this blog, non-whites at the lab are treated even worse than the females.
As I was looking through the meeting agendas this evening, I suddenly noticed that for a long stretch there were no physics analysis presentations by females at "all hands" meetings, then there was a presentation I had given in 2004, and then there was another long stretch with asbolutely no physics presentations by females. For 14 long months, around 40 physics analyses were presented to the collaboration in the big "all hands" meetings, and Absinthe was the only female presenter. Also note that the only reason they deigned to allott Absinthe her presentation is because she discovered a particle. That, and she was the only person who could have given that presentation because she was the only person who did the analysis. Otherwise you can be damn sure that presentation would have been allotted to a male.
Enough facts for you?
