The Lab Sex Ratio Question

Of course, it depends on the personalities of the people, but I agree with Propter Doc that there is an ideal mix of co-worker genders. Something around 50-50. 60-40 works, too, but 70-30 is about the cutoff in either direction.

I actually think that the ratio itself influences behavior and perceptions of behavior. When the ratio is close to even, that there is less gendered behavior of all kinds. When the ratio is skewed, some kind of group sex dynamics come into play which make the women and men both act more stereotypically gendered, hence more annoying. It becomes, when someone does something, "how just like a man" or "she's such a girl" because there is an obvious majority ("normal") versus a minority ("other") which define the members of the group.

When the ratio is skewed in either direction, also, it becomes more likely that a dominating, sterotypically gendered person (e.g. the macho male or the bitchy female) will influence the personalities of the other labmates; either they conform or react. If there were a healthy balance of males and females, it is less likely that hypermasculinity or hyperfemininity would be seen as normalized behaviors by the group, rather than a quirk of the individual.