I have a fairly strong math background -- well, "for a girl" and "for a former homemaker." I usually don't bother to identify as particularly math-y on HN because for that crowd I'm still doing arithmetic on my fingers and toes.
But other than HN, in most crowds, I'm usually one of the mathier people in the room. This was true in GIS school as well.
It was a "bootcamp" style Summer School that happened over the course of eight weeks, so most of my classmates were the same for all classes and they got to see me a LOT in various classes. Some of those classes were fairly math heavy.
In one class, the professor was a surveyor and you could see him running geometry through his brain from the perspective of being one of the points in a large-scale figure. This was no doubt how he experienced his job.
The class was very technical and very mathy. We did a lot of lat-long work, which is something most people find hard.
I argued with him one day that he was doing his lat-long calculations wrong on the blackboard and he finally got exasperated and said "I'll bet you lunch!" A moment later, it dawned on him that I was right and he said "I feel a lunch coming on."
He didn't really want to be seen having lunch with a pretty female student of his, so at the end of class that day he very graciously thanked me for keeping him on track and not getting everyone in class confused, slipped me twenty dollars and told me to buy myself lunch.
On the one hand, I felt respected. On the other hand, it felt like if I were male, this would have been a terrific networking opportunity -- to have lunch with a professor whose math error I had caught -- but as a girl I was being denied an opportunity that could have potentially enhanced my career prospects.
Another of my professors was Egyptian. I think English was his fourth language, so he sometimes had to pause and think how to translate math into English words in his head from something else.
One of the languages he spoke was French. He and I would exchange pleasantries in French, which was probably easier for him than English and it was a rare opportunity for me to practice my French.
He was a proud papa and told very fond stories to the class about his adult daughter who was roughly my age. I was quite firmly convinced that he was not a sexist pig, was not hitting on me and was personally fond of me in a completely platonic, fatherly sort of way.
And, yet, anytime I held my hand up first/immediately whenever he asked a math question in class and he called on me and I answered it correctly, he would go "How do you know that?" like he just couldn't accept that my correct answer was something I had actually worked out that quickly.
This happened so consistently that a male classmate finally blurted one day "She's obviously worked it out in her head already" because I was never wrong. I always had the right answer, but he had trouble accepting the right answer from me that quickly.
Since we got along so well...etc... I finally concluded that I was probably the first woman he had met in his life who was that good at math. I concluded that it was like he just had trouble parsing a woman speaking math so fluently and my girly accent didn't quite compute.
Since then, I am more inclined to give people some latitude instead of immediately giving them hell about being sexist pigs or whatever.
But other than HN, in most crowds, I'm usually one of the mathier people in the room. This was true in GIS school as well.
It was a "bootcamp" style Summer School that happened over the course of eight weeks, so most of my classmates were the same for all classes and they got to see me a LOT in various classes. Some of those classes were fairly math heavy.
In one class, the professor was a surveyor and you could see him running geometry through his brain from the perspective of being one of the points in a large-scale figure. This was no doubt how he experienced his job.
The class was very technical and very mathy. We did a lot of lat-long work, which is something most people find hard.
I argued with him one day that he was doing his lat-long calculations wrong on the blackboard and he finally got exasperated and said "I'll bet you lunch!" A moment later, it dawned on him that I was right and he said "I feel a lunch coming on."
He didn't really want to be seen having lunch with a pretty female student of his, so at the end of class that day he very graciously thanked me for keeping him on track and not getting everyone in class confused, slipped me twenty dollars and told me to buy myself lunch.
On the one hand, I felt respected. On the other hand, it felt like if I were male, this would have been a terrific networking opportunity -- to have lunch with a professor whose math error I had caught -- but as a girl I was being denied an opportunity that could have potentially enhanced my career prospects.
Another of my professors was Egyptian. I think English was his fourth language, so he sometimes had to pause and think how to translate math into English words in his head from something else.
One of the languages he spoke was French. He and I would exchange pleasantries in French, which was probably easier for him than English and it was a rare opportunity for me to practice my French.
He was a proud papa and told very fond stories to the class about his adult daughter who was roughly my age. I was quite firmly convinced that he was not a sexist pig, was not hitting on me and was personally fond of me in a completely platonic, fatherly sort of way.
And, yet, anytime I held my hand up first/immediately whenever he asked a math question in class and he called on me and I answered it correctly, he would go "How do you know that?" like he just couldn't accept that my correct answer was something I had actually worked out that quickly.
This happened so consistently that a male classmate finally blurted one day "She's obviously worked it out in her head already" because I was never wrong. I always had the right answer, but he had trouble accepting the right answer from me that quickly.
Since we got along so well...etc... I finally concluded that I was probably the first woman he had met in his life who was that good at math. I concluded that it was like he just had trouble parsing a woman speaking math so fluently and my girly accent didn't quite compute.
Since then, I am more inclined to give people some latitude instead of immediately giving them hell about being sexist pigs or whatever.