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It may be because I've seen academia in anthropology/archaeology, but the behavior that the articles describe don't really surprise me. The competitive nature of academia has always been something of a turn-off to me, and I knew that academia had a lot of politics, but seeing it stated so baldly in both Thom's article, and the article by Sonnert and Holton, was a bit disheartening to say the least. The idea that men tend to get more opportunities because they're more aggressive and self-promoting, and that they tend to look better to institutions because they publish more, was a pretty frank summary of some of the downright intrigue-filled plots that people have for advancing their own careers. It really wasn't something I had expected from academia at all, until I got into college and started seeing it for myself.

The threshold hypothesis was new to me, though. I'd always heard of it as a glass ceiling, and while the threshold isn't particularly good, it does give me more hope. Eventually being taken seriously is a good step to being taken seriously every step of the way.

Like others have said, it was really nice to get some hard and fast numbers for things I'd only heard about anecdotally, or things that "tend to" happen.

The statistic that surprised me the most was from Ivie and Guo's article, about how female physicists would "choose physics again (86%), a majority (71%) also reported being discouraged by physics" (Ivie and Guo 9). These women clearly love their field, but the number of them who have been discouraged by it is... well, worrying. Especially for the reasons of finding employment and the discrimination in the field-- one of the respondants from France remarked that someone actually told her that women couldn't do certain fields of physics because they weren't intelligent or clever enough!