Women at various career levels mentioned invisibility: ``I'd say something in my group, and no one heard me. When the person next to me repeated my idea, everyone complimented him. This happened several times. Maybe it's female tentativeness, looking for agreement before standing up for what you believe. After a few times, I said to the person repeating my idea, `Yes, that's exactly what I was trying to say earlier. Thank you for rephrasing my idea.' The group slowly got what was happening, and it has stopped.''
A well-known woman said, ``When I interact with industry, I am often ignored in favor of my male colleagues, even when I am the senior scientist and principal investigator. One experience remains in my mind, a visit from a granting committee: A colleague and I, as coinvestigators, were up for a grant renewal. We had invited a junior member of the department to participate in the new grant. While the funding agents, all men, spent three to four hours questioning us, they did not address one question to me. Instead they asked my coinvestigator and the junior man, who had not even participated in the previous grant.''
Finally, another leader in AI said, ``Companies are worse than universities. A company is much more structured; you have to `fit in.' They tolerate me because I bring in money and do my work. I'm never given credit or asked my opinion. I feel personal invisibility here...it's an emotional drain. I never felt that in academia. Other companies have significant equal-opportunity efforts. You won't find token minorities there.''