Candy Sidner, a AAAI fellow and a member of the research staff at Digital's Cambridge Research Laboratory, talked on the record about the differences between working in a place with few female peers and a place where women comprise a sizable proportion, a ``critical mass.'' Her lab has six women among 22 principal researchers, enough to change the environment, including how people interact and treat each other. She explained, ``I think men have a hard time collaborating with women (in either research or general lab activities) until there are enough women around that they feel comfortable and have productive expectations of women colleagues. When you have a bunch of women colleagues, you usually find more than one you respect, and it changes your perception of the whole group!... When enough women are around, the fraternity atmosphere becomes a society, a community.'' Sidner also believes that women value consensus more than do men, and that they compete with and critique others differently. She attributes such differences to socialized skills learned in childhood, and she sees the same forces at work today in her nine-year-old daughter's experiences.
Another woman said, ``When I first started, my research group consisted of older students, including two women. Later, younger men joined, and I was the only woman. The character definitely became much more of a `male banter' style of interaction - which I really disliked.''
Another woman commented on the banter: ``It has grated more and more on my nerves to hear some of the stuff guys think they can dish out. Many of the male TAs joke (or even say seriously) that they make female students go out with them for grades. Male friends tell me about jokes they make with male professors about women in or out of the department...I have heard many guys make comments like `The women on the faculty are technically far below the males,' which is patently not true by any objective measurement...Male friends think that in the name of friendship they can be as coarse or vulgar or make as outrageously sexist statements as they like; I think they do this more for shock value than anything else. None of this is particularly terrible, but can get annoying after the first 50 times it happens. As a woman in science, I have had to develop a thick skin and decide what is worth fighting about and what is not.''
Disproportionate male-female ratios made it difficult for several women to interact socially with other students, sometimes being the only woman present. ``As a grad student, I used to feel self-conscious about joining my male peers for a pizza. Now that I'm older, I don't care what other people think. I know I'm not doing anything wrong.'' Another added, ``Being a single woman is the hardest. Heterosexually coupled social events are very important for making contacts.''
Naturally, AI conferences are generally male events. A few women referred to their discomfort dealing with the conference cocktail party syndrome. One said, ``When I used to go to conferences, some man would approach me, at first seeming like he was interested in talking about AI. I couldn't get rid of him. My fellow graduate students (all male) laughed at me, and gave me advice: Be really rude to people, wear crummy clothes, and look as ugly as you can. Eventually, I stopped making eye contact or being very friendly with anyone at conferences. That's not very helpful for making connections in the field, but better for staying safe. Over the years, I've developed an air of control around myself and I don't have to hide so much, but I remember how annoying it was at the time. And I realized where all the jokes about conferences come from. Somehow, I did not think it would apply to `intelligent' men.''