All Female Research group

I've been in my new grad school lab for 4 weeks now, and the biggest difference from my previous lab is how many girls there are! I sit in an office with 2 other girls, both second years, and there are 2 other grad school girls and one postdoc girl (woman, really, as we all are, but no matter) who sit in the other office. In fact the lab is probably split male-female about 50/50 but the girls are more social and we interact with each other more. Furthermore a lot of the male postdocs don't socialize so much with the rest of the group because they are a lot older than us, so this leaves me surrounded by an unprecedented level of estrogen.

It's fun. I've learned more about some people in 4 weeks than I learned about some of the guys in my old lab in 16 months, and it's not because I was antisocial or reclusive in the old lab. I'm not trying to suggest here that i've met my grad school soulmates. I haven't. I don't think I'm going to have grad school soulmates. I try to be friendly and nice and listen and be open, and I like everyone and people seem to like me just fine, but I'm very much making my own path as far as the science goes, with taking physics classes and working in a chemistry lab and not really finding a mentor for myself inside the group just yet. (That's something I need to get on, incidentally, but that's a subject for a different post). But the point is that working with girls, or at least with these girls, means that there's more conversation and interaction. I feel a lot more comfortable asking silly science questions, and also sharing personal stories. In my old lab, no one knew I was married for about 4 months, and the professor didn't know until he had to write my grad school application letters. Here everyone knows, because I've felt comfortable enough sharing things that begin with "my husband..."

On the other hand, I feel like all this socialness wears me out a little bit. I'm always worried about saying something awful that will offend my labmates and alienate them for weeks. I know that people have their differences and I'm not worried that sasying something offensive will ruin my career prospects or anything like that, but I do want to be on good terms with people and it takes energy to watch what I'm saying all the time.