@Thierry Zell, your statement "they feel that their home lives make more demands on their free time than the home lives of their male counterparts." is evidenced in the math movie :The Proof.

Izabella writes:

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.

Dear Mariano,

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

@markvs-

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!

+1 Dylan.

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.)

@Mark:

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?