WIMPs = ½ × (ROMPs + DIMPs)

The article on women in medical physics (WIMP) by Scott Crowe and Tanya Kairns [1] published in this issue of APESM created a lot of behind the scenes editorial activity at this journal. A finding of this study was that women currently constitute approximately 28 % of the medical physics workforce in Australia and New Zealand. It could be said that researching into the numbers of women active in medical physics and comparing them to those of men, is not within the core area of research expertise of many (any?) medical physicists. Consequently everyone feels as qualified as anyone else to comment about it. Furthermore it is an emotive issue. Perhaps this explains why the manuscript generated so much under water activity. As editor, I provided the authors with my thoughts and comments by way of an un-blinded review as even I felt qualified to comment on the topic. The authors suggested that I put my thoughts into an editorial. Crowe and Kairns referred, among other things, to the number of articles published in this journal that had a female as first (or last) author, or as author of a guest editorial or invited article. These references make it appropriate for the editor of APESM to comment. While I have no influence over who submits a manuscript to APESM or in what order they list their authors, I do have control over who gets invited to write an article or editorial for APESM. Some of the data in the Crowe and Kairns paper was presented at the Wellington EPSM2015 conference at a talk [2] that I attended. The data included that only 7/45 (16 %) of the guest editorials in APESM had been written by women. This is entirely my fault and I immediately set about making the data obsolete by ensuring that the next four editorials were female authored. And this was before I knew that a WIMP manuscript was to be submitted to APESM. In my defence, 5 of the first 16 guest editorials (31 %) were by women. This serves to illustrate that I can present the data in a way that favours me to make a point, and that perhaps I am not a reliable indicator of the influence of women in Australasian medical physics. I am unreliable due to my bias and my three-pronged strategy for sourcing guest editorials: whimsy, serendipity, and saying yes to whoever offers. Admittedly I tended to approach authors who were known to me (whimsy) and who have had considerable experience at working as medical physicists as I thought that they would have something to say (my bias). This category also includes the associate editors of APESM. I often use the opportunity of the EPSM conference to invite an editorial from someone that I am standing next to, or sharing the dinner table or a bus seat with, when the conversation makes it apparent that I am in the company of a knowledgeable person (serendipity). Four people have approached me with an offer to write a guest editorial and each time I have said yes. In addition, from time to time an author will approach me for advice about whether their idea for an article would be suitable for the journal. In this case we negotiate and sometimes we resolve that I ‘‘invite’’ the author to write the article. Some of the flurry of editorial activity caused by the manuscript was due to differing opinions about how to properly collect and interpret the data, and what data to collect. It is common in articles about male : female ratios in many activities (particularly physics) to say the ratio favours men. And that this is not a good thing. And something should be done about it. However, to add some & Martin Caon martin.caon@flinders.edu.au