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Recent Questions - MathOverflow Meta · Jan 7, 2026

What is being done to make MathOverflow more welcoming to women?

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I'm not really sure that anything really needs to be done in this respect. There are several rather unwelcoming tendencies here (and I am prone to making some fuss about them now and then) but I do not find any of them gender-specific in any way unless we accept the belief that the female mathematician psychology is somehow drastically different from the male mathematician one, the belief I personally do not share. In my humble opinion of an old stupid male, if someone's question is answered in full and all clarifications of unclear places are provided in a polite and reasonably timely manner (instead of being closed for some ridiculous reason like "not research level" upon being posted), that is all one is really entitled to regardless of their gender, nationality, religion, galaxy of origin, number of eyes, body chemical composition, or anything else. The rest is privileges, not rights, and nobody has any obligation to provide them, especially when nobody has the slightest idea of what exactly is really being requested. All that talk about general "competitiveness" or "rudeness" influencing women more than men is a sheer BS. Yep, there were several comments to my posts in which I used the words "damn", "hell" and "shit" that went like "Watch your foul tongue!", but I've talked to many female persons in my life and if one seriously tries to convince me that they never use swear words or never act aggressively, I'll just laugh in his or even her face.

In general, I find the questions of the type "What is being done to accommodate the needs of ...?" well posed only if they are accompanied by the clear list of those needs. I see no point in wild guessing here. As I said, I see some issues, but when they arise, the gender does not seem to me to be a factor at all. Possibly, those issues are more repelling to an average female person than to an average male person, so resolving them may be more beneficial for the female users. However, I find them worth resolving regardless of anything and being discussed without any gender references. Obvious minor things like using he/she or they when the gender is not certain have been implemented long ago and are more or less maintained. The major things have never been here, as far as I can judge (nobody has ever written something like "Of course, the post was unclear! What would you expect from a girl?" in the comments, not in any of the threads I've seen, at least). At this point the request seems to be at the level "Go I don't know where and bring me I don't know what". We can try to do even that, of course, but then one shouldn't be surprised if what we bring is exactly opposite to what was desired.

Read the original on meta.mathoverflow.net

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