Petrie multiplier

[3] The multiplier "shows that if the percentage of men and women in the room who make questionable remarks to the other sex is equal, then the average number of sexist remarks experienced by members of one party scales by the square of the proportion of the offending party to the other.

This holds in general, so with a gender ratio of 1:r, women will receive r² times as many sexist remarks as men.The Petrie multiplier corresponds to Lanchester's square law in battle and predator–prey dynamics.

Further, each sexist remark made by a man is assumed to randomly target one of the women and vice versa.

[4] A more complex analysis published in the Journal of Physics A modeled heterogeneous levels of sexism by assuming each person to make sexist remarks according to an independent Poisson process, maintaining the assumption that each sexist remark is directed to an individual of the opposite sex.

[6] Another probabilistic analysis found that the multiplier seemed to hold and suggested that the disparity could be even worse than quadratic.