The associate professor added that 'such confidence may arise from attractive people' s general sense of their high mate-value' .

But at the next level - tenure-track associate professor - the proportion of females shrinks to single digits.

She's also an associate professor at Columbia journalism school.

The author is associate professor of geography at the School of Geosciences, University of Wollongong, Australia.

This system, called "quorum sensing," is an interesting example of sophistication among microbes, says Helen Blackwell, an associate professor of chemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.