In Which I Do Math on Gender, Again

Sometimes I see a “top X” list that’s, shall we say, all male (think lists of top scientists, recommended SFF authors, etc.). And when people object, others defend against the objection with,“But what if the field’s mostly male???”

There are a wholehost of problems with this, but I’m not really going to get into them here. I’m just going to do some math.

As far as I can figure, my starting assumptions are only that (1) we expect Top-X lists to sample gender randomly — that is, that a male per...