I'm back tonight from a perfectly lovely weekend down in Florida attending the AAUW convention there. I was one of their featured speakers and I got to talk about Title IX and our national laboratories...a topic that is near and dear to my heart.
All other professional conferences I have attended have been physics conferences, and they are totally male dominated. There is also an air of competition permeating these conferences because they are a place where experiments release new results. And often various experiments are in keen competition to be the first to release a particular result. I've heard some conferences referred to as "a big pissing match" (a rather male analogy if there ever was one). I remember being at a conference in the 1990's when I was still a graduate student and the first top quark observations had been made by the CDF and Dzero experiments at Fermilab (at the time I was collaborating on an experiment in Europe). I recall groups of physicists from the two experiments actually being openly hostile (apparently there were hard feelings because one experiment had to hold its results for a week or two while the other experiment completed its analysis such that the two analyses could be unveiled simultaneously). I remember being appalled at seeing such open hostilities during a professional meeting. And then I went and did a postdoc at Fermilab....in hindsight, what a dumb thing to do...
There was no sense of competition at the AAUW convention. Just warm welcome. And wonderful conversations with people who were perfect strangers (at least at the beginning of the convention...by the second day I had met most of the people there and knew many by name). I was approached by many people who started up warm friendly conversations with me. I can tell you that this never happens at a physics conference; if you don't know someone, they don't come up and start a friendly conversation with you. I don't want to generalize too much, but I've been to a lot of physics conferences, and I have repeatedly noted that people really do not mingle. If you don't have friends at the conference with you, it is pretty dreary. And it isn't just me who has noted this about physics conferences.
I had a wonderful time down in Florida, and I enjoyed being at a conference for once in my life that was not male dominated, and was overwhelmingly welcoming and friendly. I cannot say enough good things about AAUW as an organization, and their members as individuals. I am so grateful for their support, and I was honored to be a part of their recent convention.
