Another article about my study of conference allocations at Fermilab was published earlier this week. I disagree somewhat with the first paragraph of the article; I'm not sure if the particle physics community is "reeling" because of the results of my study and I'm also not sure if I'd classify the results of the study as "damning"...it sounds harsher than I would have put it.
I was interested to read in the article that some people at ATLAS (a new particle physics experiment due to start soon in Europe) feel that ATLAS won't likely have gender equity problems because women currently hold a significant fraction of leadership roles on the experiment. This is interesting because the Dzero experiment at Fermilab also had a healthy fraction of women in physics leadership roles for several years before the experiment started taking data. Immediately after the experiment started taking data, the number of women in physics leadership roles plummeted, and the number of women shunted into service work leadership roles rose significantly. The fraction of women in physics (service work) leadership roles remained low (high) for the rest of the time I was on the experiment. The probability of this pattern randomly occuring simultaneously in the absence of gender bias is 0.1%.
Unlike the conference allocation study, this study took all of half an hour...I simply looked at the long list of physics working group and service working group leaders since 2000 on Dzero and counted how many people were female, and how many were male. The experiment started taking significant amounts of data and cranking out its first analyses in mid to late 2003 so the time period I looked at was divided almost exactly in half by that milestone.
It will be really interesting to see if the number of women appointed to physics leadership roles on ATLAS stays as high as it is now once ATLAS starts recording significant amounts of data. It would be nice if that happens.
