#GoodRead | The Odds That a Panel Would 'Randomly' Be All Men Are Astronomical

by Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur, Mainz (own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

"The Odds That a Panel Would 'Randomly' Be All Men Are Astronomical":

All-male speaker lineups are so commonplace that there’s at least one Tumblr blog dedicated to mocking them. The endless stream of them can leave one overwhelmed and perhaps even convinced that they’re inevitable.

Enter the mathematician Greg Martin, who has devised a statistical probability analysis that even amateurs can (mostly) understand. Working with a “conservative” assumption that 24 percent of Ph.D.s in mathematics have been granted to women over the last 25 years, he finds that it’s statistically impossible that a speakers’ lineup including one woman and 19 men could be random.

Read Lauren Bacon's full article at The Atlantic here…