[VLM]

He's hanging out with the wrong mathematicians. Or the ladies have, um, made a judgment, and don't want to intimidate him by their superior STEM achievements.

CS is a sausage fest as we all know here on HN. What most HN readers don't know is around 46% to 48% of all math undergrad degrees in the USA have gone to women since the early 80s.

You can read some hilarious articles online about the "crisis" that women have declined to a mere 45% in some years. I make fun of it because my EE classes had zero female grads, everyone knows CS is a sausagefest, why I remember a decade ago in an advanced C++ class I got to work with "the" girl in the class, all true stories, but if there's one thing not to fret about, its that an office staffed by recent math grads (McDonalds? Applebees?) would have either 10 of each or at worst 11 men to 9 women, hardly a staggering imbalance like you see in CS/IT.

[bradleyjg]

The disconnect may be a result of what schools people are familiar with. At (Carnegie Classification) Research I universities men make up 64% of math and stats majors, whereas at Masters I there is almost parity. These university types are #1 (~8000) and #2 (~6000).

Still even 64% is hardly EE at Research I (85% male), so your overall point stands.

[jinfiesto]

Indeed. I'm a math major, and the ratio of men to women is quite healthy.