  In this study, headcounts of all personnel in Nobel Prize-winning labs were
collected and sorted by gender. These results are used to determine gender
representation of graduate students in elite institutions on the pipeline
towards higher academic positions. Larger gender disparities are seen in
physics and physical chemistry labs and are reduced in biologically focused
labs. These differences are greater in Nobel Prize-winning institutions when
compared to the USA and EU averages. The gender bias in hiring during the
transition between postdoctoral fellow and junior faculty seems to be the
bottleneck for women; exacerbated by family formation. Women who surpass this
hurdle achieve tenure at the same rate and do not perform any worse than men in
such fields. Reduced participation in mathematically intensive fields can also
be traced to propensities of girls preferences to deviate from them as early as
kindergarten. As such, gender disparity may not be due to recalcitrant
pernicious attitudes of individuals towards women. Accumulated advantages such
as societal expectation, asymmetric teaching efforts and acceptance of men to
enter certain fields, over decades, may put men in more favourable positions
while competing for placement in prestigious labs. However, these factors are
sensitive to cultural shifts and show generational effects indicating the
possibility of equality facilitated by sociocultural shifts in expectation for
young women.
