I am currently attending the meeting of the American Chemical Society and was surprised by the way people were dressed for the poster presentations. In particular, many young women (and some young men) seemed to be dressed for a night out (tight clothes, heels, make up, etc.). This is not what I'm used to in European or international meetings (including international meetings at the US). More senior female (and male) researchers were wearing clothes I'm more used to in this kind of setting.

This made me wonder: is there some sort of implicit sexism at play here, and do some of these young female researchers feel the need to impress other researchers (both male and female) with their appearance?

I probably should also add that I usually attend physics meetings rather than chemistry meetings, where the ratio of female/male is much higher (we really need to work on improving this in physics). So perhaps dressing habits are simply different across fields.