A Male's Experience of Being a Gender Minority

During the academic year 2003-04 I had the great privilege of being a fellow at Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (at Harvard University). In this essay, I will confine myself to one aspect of that great experience: being a male in an academic institute that is directed by women and in which women are in large majority. First, the basic statistics. During that period, the institute hosted 56 fellows, with a 48:8 proportion of women to men. The institute's four chief executives (the Institute's Dean, Program Director, and the Deans of Science and Sociology) were women.