A male graduate student told me he started taking a yoga class only to find that there was only one other man and the remaining 29 were women. He said he didn’t feel like he belonged and so he dropped the class.
A female graduate student at SODA told me she didn’t see a single talk by a woman and she didn’t feel like she belonged.
(There were talks by women, but with 3-4 sessions, and none of the keynotes by women, well, they can be easy to miss.)
Huh. None of the keynotes at SODA 2013 were by women either. In fact, 6 of the last 10 SODAs have had all male keynote speaker lineups. I remember SODA 2007, when 2 of the keynotes were by women – Monika Henzinger and Maria Chudnovsky – and I remember how much of an influence that had on me.
There are degrees of feeling that you don’t belong. There is “I am a minority” as in a man in a yoga class, and then there is “they think I’m only here for their amusement” as in a woman in a CS conference or http://ariannasimpson.com/post/74400025051/this-is-what-its-like-to-be-a-woman-at-a-bitcoin