by Ian Randall. Published: 18 March 2011

ALICE is quite frequently asked about the proportion of women in the collaboration, and their respective ages. The following graphs and charts express some of the data on ALICE’s present female members, as gathered from CERN’s human resources database.


ALICE Collaboration

A chart depicting the relative proportions of men and women in ALICE.
The labels on the outside of the pie show the percentage and the absolute values.

ALICE Collaboration

The respective percentages of women in ALICE, by age group


ALICE Collaboration

The distribution of the ages of women in ALICE


ALICE Collaboration

Percentage of women in ALICE per country of home institute. The actual number of women in each sample, and the total number of men and women, is shown in brackets.


ALICE Collaboration

Percentage of women in ALICE per nationality. The actual number of women in each sample is shown in brackets.

Comments

I believe you are misreading

I believe you are misreading the labels - they represent two values each: the absolute and the percentage.

There are 1105 people in ALICE in total - of these, 179 are women, and 926 are men.

[179 + 926 = 1105]

Therefore, 16% are female [ (179/1105) * 100 ];
...and 84% are male [ (926/1105) * 100 ]

Hope that clears things up for you?

If the numbers are taken from

If the numbers are taken from the Alice collaboration database (acdb), they may not reflect the exact representation. In that case, the total number of people in Alice (1105) represents the number of Alice authors. But there are people who form an important part in the functioning of the experiment but are not authors. Their number may or may not be significant.