If you had walked into the CMS control room (P5) today 8th of March of 2010, you would have seen an almost only-women crew at the controls. It was my last day on-call for the CMS high level trigger system, so I had to attend the daily meeting at CMS P5. It was fun to see an overwhelming number of women.
I haven’t been paying much attention, and I don’t know the statistics, but I have the feeling that there’s usually a good mix of women and man in the control room. As a matter of fact, this past week (when I was on-call and I had to go to P5 every day) both run field managers were women and I guess they continue for this week.
The fun part of today was that they managed to schedule women for 32 out of the 34 shift positions required to run the CMS experiment; or at least that’s what I was told. I am sure those two other spots were not filled in with women because the women that can cover them are very busy. Like my boss, for example, who were supposed to be here for this day but couldn’t make it because she is rather busy with some other CMS responsibilities in the US.
Now, I am curious if they could manage to do the inverse though, i.e., have mostly man scheduled for shifts. That would be an interesting exercise; it won’t be easy for sure, as many women in CMS have essential expertise in many areas.
All in all it was a good day, it definitely felt like a special day, and that’s always a lot of fun. It smelled very nice too!
Hope all women had a good day !!
Edgar Carrera (Boston University)
