Contrary to the statements of markvs, however, I think that all men should admit that we are, in some sense, part of the problem. It's unfair, and it's rather de facto, but as long as women are born as unequal then we will be born as problem-makers. And we need to accept that, and try to do what we can to (1) admit that we are in a privileged position...

I just think that this notion is extremely damaging. We are as individuals responsible for our own behavior. Being born male does not make a person part of the problem. This reeks of that extremely pernicious dogma of original sin. I agree with the suggestions you made, but I can't wrap my head around this part of it. Admitting that we are in a priveleged position (1) should not be equivalent to admitting guilt for some wrong act.

Yes, it would be great if everyone could be outspoken, arrogant, and forceful, concentrating only on the pursuit of truth and not on the feelings of those around them. Unfortunately those are traits that Western society tolerates only in men -- women exhibiting such behaviors are quickly shut out, ostracized or marginalized. I'm sure that if you found yourself in such a situation it wouldn't take you long to learn that certain methods of presentation and discussion got your point across or got the job done, while others got you ignored or worse.

I don't agree with this premise. Stop projecting your prejudices on all of us.

Before disagreeing with this assessment (I never notice it either! that doesn't mean it doesn't happen), I have a modest proposal: go to three or four of the women you know who have been successful in their chosen profession, and ask them if they ever think about how best to present their ideas to maximize the chance that their voice will actually be heard. Personally I know very few women who are not highly conscious of this reality, not only in professional life but in daily interactions.

You've never had to suck up to someone to have your concerns heard? This experience is not unique to women.

I think that this whole notion of feeling guilty about how women are treated in mathematics and other places is not the right answer. You do what you can to make things better. You're only guilty if you haven't made that effort.

I am equally annoyed by men doing the same. It is a personality trait I associate with stupidity, wishful thinking and cowardice... I am by far not the only one around with this kind of thinking (among the ones I know).

Generally inferences are only as good as the data or the sampling procedure used to get them. Also, mote in thy brother's eye, and all that. (If you really want to discuss this further with me, I suggest contacting me by email, because I am currently sufficiently angry that any attempts by me to respond here will I fear not be very constructive or edifying.)

For what little it's worth (speaking as a British male living in Canada, educated in a particularly odd series of crucibles), I am inclined to agree with what Noah Snyder, Todd Trimble and Pete L. Clark have said above; while I think the comments/observations made by esmeyny and abmiller should give many of us pause for thought.

Disclaimer: This post has been written without any guarantees that the writer is or isn't a North American, anglophone woman by birth, education, nationality and/or current, former or future affiliation.

This is just silly... I think it's safe to let us know what continent you live on...

[And, to respond to something which is only slightly frustrating: @Sergei: I lived in Canada for 2.5 years. Please believe me that Canadians do not self-identify as "American". When you say "American" in Canada, they know you mean residents of the big, loud country to the south. I can't speak for Mexico, but I would be surprised if it were different there.]

The personalities of the female graduate students were not representative. As a group, in distribution, female graduate students seemed to me to be far more motivated, assertive, and self-protective than the average human being.

First, my recollection of fellow female grad students is quite different, I found them as diverse as the males. Moreover, I am not convinced at all that this provides evidence of sexism in Math. It can actually be used to argue the opposite. I found American women as a whole more motivated, assertive, and self-protective than the females in my culture, but I very much doubt that there are more sexism in America than in my country (Vietnam, since Pete asked).

It seems like a better follow-up, given the original purpose of the thread "is there anything we can do to address these concerns?/ to convince women who have been treated this way in the past that they will not be burned again"? Unfortunately these are genuinely hard questions: there's not an easy answer.

In light of Pete's comment, I agree that perhaps the question should be "to convince Anglophone/ North American women who have been treated this way in the past...". This focusses the question in a way which I think is constructive.
I don't think feminism/politics is an issue: the issue is to convince a group of people who are wary (perhaps for good reason) that this is a safe and worthwhile place to discuss mathematics. And clearly this is a problem. I would point out that we haven't seen many Russian or Eastern European female mathematicians on MO either, although I don't know what to make of this either.
I don't think there's an easy answer, but clearly we should be nice to one another, and have low tolerance for misogynous and unfriendly comments, which I don't think are OK in any country or culture.

-1 Anixx: off-topic, not constructive, lazy thinking, and potentially offensive.

If I may make a suggestion: we are currently talking about cultural practices among mathematicians and mathematical communities. On the other hand, there are also profound cultural differences between different, um, cultures, i.e., people of different nationalities and geographic locations. But Math Overflow represents -- not officially or exclusively, but for the most part -- anglophone, North American culture. I feel like some people coming from outside of anglophone North American culture are writing in to say, "No, that doesn't entirely square with my experience." Well, no kidding. Living in Russia, or Japan, or Germany, or Romania is still not exactly the same as living in North America. (Even Canada is not exactly the same as the United States -- you may laugh, but I was reeling from culture shock for much of the postdoc I did in Montreal. But in my experience it's close enough, especially in this regard, so as not to fragment the discussion.)

Would it be too restrictive to limit this conversation to behaviors and treatment of women in anglophone, North American academia? Or, at least, if you are coming from a different culture, could you please indicate that as a disclaimer / point of information?

The only case that comes into my mind was of one person posting in this topic, and it was done for the holy end of trolling string theorists rather than for whatever else people register under a nick of the opposite sex.

That made my day, thank you. I'm very glad to know that somebody's fighting the good fight of trolling physicists.

As a group, in distribution, female graduate students seemed to me to be far more motivated, assertive, and self-protective than the average human being.

The only reasonable conclusion here is that there is some selection pressure operating against females that is not operating against males (at least at the point of getting into graduate school). I still don't know what this selection pressure is.

Back to the current question - my hypothesis is that, whatever this selection pressure is, it pushes against personalities of the kind that would spend time on Internet sites helping relative strangers.

Thank you for this contribution! I had not thought much about this, but it's something very much worth noticing.

While the question, "Why aren't there more women in Math Overflow?" is an interesting topic in its own right, I see this as especially interesting as an avatar for the big question, "Why aren't there more women in Math?"

In particular the comments above begin to scratch the itch of finding the difference between the two questions.

In particular, Gil mentioned above that he knows of "no examples of behavior over MO which is specifically or intentionally unfriendly to women." I would have agreed with that sentiment, but no longer can because of this thread.

For what it's worth, I don't know of any such behaviors either.

In particular, I think that eliminating the problem itself (discrimination against women on the internet) is a far superior idea

Oh, definitely!

and confusing pronoun usage with misogyny

I was definitely not guilty of that confusion. If you think I was, please read again more carefully.

I don't think any non-victims have any clue as to how often this type of thing occurs. It's all too easy to say that sexism emanating from a public site is non-existent if one has never personally experienced it.

The thing about language is interesting to me (I am not counting silly instances like 'Manchester' or 'history'). I myself am not very consistent about pronoun usage -- I use a mixture of "he", "she", "one", or some pluralized construction, depending on my mood -- but I do think about this often. For those who defend "he" as gender-neutral: fine, but does it particularly bother you if someone writes "she"? And if so, why exactly?

I can only speak for myself, but when reading about say a generic mathematician, I will often form a picture (maybe a pretty abstracted picture, but on some level a picture), and if "he" is used, then it's very easy to slip unconsciously into adding male characteristics to the picture. All I can do is try to be aware of that -- I certainly don't demand that people change how they write to accommodate my personal idiosyncrasies, but I would encourage others to at least consider the possibility that such things do happen to (I presume) many people, and I imagine many women are attuned to that, regardless of how much it bothers them.

By the way, I should clarify that I'm not trying to say anti-Semitism doesn't exist (IRL or on the internet), just that (as far as I can tell) sexism is more likely to be a problem on a generic math or science or programming forum.

Perhaps you're right and sexism isn't a problem on MO. But how do we know unless we let people -- especially women, who are more likely to notice it -- talk freely?

One thing that I've noticed as a student is that, while today there are usually several (usually not parity still) women among fellow students, there still tend to be very few among the professors (and my department is admittedly unusually skewed in this regard); it reaches the point where it is almost surprising (and I'm embarrassed to say this) to see a woman as a tenured professor, not (I hope!) out of any sexism on my part, but simply since -- mostly coincidentally, I would say -- I've never interacted with a female mathematician for a significant length of time (e.g. by taking a class, doing a project), and I've been habituated, lecture after lecture, to think of "professor" as "middle-aged male." And, however many times I say the word "noetherian ring" or see women on the department list, personal experience seems to be irreplaceable.

Having hung around other mathematical communities on the web, this extreme imbalance is clearly present there, too, to the point where I actually notice if someone has a female username--and I clearly shouldn't, any more than I would notice that the person wears glasses. Maybe it's just me, but I doubt it.

So, I actually think that it would be great if lots of women would come to MO--and not just come, but come with their full usernames, so that it would become completely normal to see Jane Q. Mathematician speedily answering questions on motivic cohomology. Which would thus visibly obliterate the current situation, not only for MO's sake but more generally for mathematics's -- wouldn't it be awesome if MO trends could change stereotypes about mathematicians? However, Izabella Laba and A Girl and Esmeyny have observed that there are sound reasons for the reluctance of many women to use their full names on the internet, so it seems that dispelling the problems that lead to these reasons would, in fact, be highly desirable.

@Mark: My guess is that the anti-Semitic communities you describe are pretty rare on the internet; on the other hand, sexism seems much more common both in meatspace and on the internet, as evidenced by some of the above links. (For instance, I myself can recall very instances of acquaintances being genuinely anti-Semitic, but I've met plenty of misogynistic guys in real life.)

I agree with both of your posts. Well said!

Best wishes,

Matthew

You're being part of the problem here; both esmeyny here and in Isabelle Laba's post which is linked from this thread, the authors point out that they are not enthusiastic about starting to use MathOverflow because they've received poor treatment from male colleagues and in internet fora before, and your response is that you're offended? Way to make people feel like they'll be welcome in our community!

A few years ago I mentioned to my mother (a retired English professor) that I use this construction sometimes, and she found it literally risible: i.e., she laughed, then she saw I was serious, then she ridiculed me. (Nevertheless she still thinks of me as a somewhat pedantic grammarian, but it's all relative, I suppose...)

Regarding pronouns: there is a war here for those who wish to fight it. Many years ago I noticed that in between the Nth and (N+1)st editions of Spivak's Calculus (I forget the value of N), he changed over from using the pronoun "he" for all mathematicians (e.g. "A mathematician would accept this as a proof because he would know how to formalize it") to using the pronoun "she" for all mathematicians (replace "he" with "she" in the previous). At the time I found this jarring and maybe a little silly. More recently I have started doing it myself: I use "she" a lot of the time when referring to a generic mathematician. Not all the time: if I want to contrast a negative behavior or incorrect idea to a positive behavior or correct idea, I use "he" for the former and "she" for the latter.

For a recent instance of "mathematical she-ing", see the abstract for my recent talk at Georgia Tech:

http://www.math.gatech.edu/seminars-colloquia/series/algebra-seminar/pete-clark-20110331

In fact a colleague of mine from UGA (the talk was a double-header) noticed and remarked upon my she-ing.

Me: Well, don't say that Pete L. Clark never did anything for women in mathematics. He: You know, I've heard you say that before. Me: Right!

Of course the first line is somewhat tongue in cheek, because this is such a small thing to do. But why not do it?

Having read the blog post, I think that expecting it "to take forever to convince people" is an extrapolation from experience in the general mathematical community. With regard to your remark that "it would be interesting to know if this actually happens", I think that the blog post makes a rather strong claim that this does happen to women in mathematics.

Regards,

Matthew

Others might be more likely to show up if casual participation were easier and more rewarding, if we didn’t expect it to take forever to convince people that we might actually know what we’re talking about, if we had no reason to believe that we’ll keep getting a lot more shrugs than up-votes for a long time.

This is one of the two reasons behind her non-participation, I think, along with lack of time. I don't understand this, really.

• How could casual participation be easier? To participate, one does not even have to sign up, if I recall correctly: it is simply a matter of asking a question or providing an answer to one.

• In what sense could casual participation be more rewarding? In the abstract, for me the rewards of participating have been in getting exposed to interesting pieces of math that I would probably have not come across otherwise, getting a few questions answered in very useful ways, learning a huge lot from lots of other participants, and, not least, gained the feeling of, well, being part of a community of sorts. Symbolically, my participation has also been rewarded with a certain number of points, but the accumulation thereof is only possible my participation is not casual but recurrent; indeed, the only sensible meaning I can attach to the number of points is as a measure of the amount of participation and value added to the site as seen by others.

• I don't understand why anyone would expect «it to take forever to convince people that we might actually know what we’re talking about». I have not noticed anyone struggling with that on MO---it would be interesting to know if this actually happens. Where do "reason[s] to believe that we’ll keep getting a lot more shrugs than up-votes for a long time" come from? I honestly do not think MO's history, so far, has given any.