In any case, my thinking/concern is informed by evidence that "stereotypical" masculine > elements in an environment (e.g., even just Star Trek posters and Mountain Dew cans!) > can affect a sense of belonging and interest. (And I say that as someone who kept Kirk > and Spock toys on my desk for many years.)
[deletia]
2). Objects can thus come to broadcast stereotypes of a group, which in turn can deter people who do not identify with these stereotypes from joining that group." \acite {CheryanEtal2009abh}
And it is not just men who inadvertently create environments that project this kind of filtration, informally filtering based on gender. "Girlzones" can be created as well due to gender imbalance.
I have extensive close experience with a good example: yoga.
Visualize a typical (at least in the US) yoga studio that has been decorated (and perhaps originally designed) primarily for yoga. Most likely the images that come to mind are a small space resembling a dance studio with bare wooden floors, teak (or some imitation) furniture near one wall with some minimalist, Asian-art inspired floral arrangements in a ceramic vase or two, and posters of yoga poses and other related artwork on the walls, often with some Sanskrit (or, well, something in Indic letters) on them. You are probably also imagining soft New Age music from a small player (usually, these days, with an iPod plugged into it) near where the instructor sits, and perhaps the smell of burnt incense or something else meant to evoke India in the air.
This has some basis in reality. And if I asked you to imagine what the class being taught looks like, you will probably imagine a female instructor (I have never had a male) and a predominantly female class. Yes, a prospective male student would be welcomed if he expressed interest. But many will see the trappings of the studio and feel that this is not a place where they would be welcomed.
And this abundance of yoginis* creates postive feedback that reinforces the filtering in other ways. When proper studios aren't available, the spaces chosen are often physically small. In one class in a room at a former computer store smaller than my son's bedroom, I stood up in mountain pose (the very simple position that involves standing with your hands straight up over your head) ... and put my hands into one of the acoustic tiles in the ceiling, lifting it up over the frame holding them when I had fully extended my arms. That was *after* moving so I wouldn't put them into the wooden ceiling fan. I'm 6'4" (193 cm) tall, and the instructor, who like many yoga instructors has a dance background and was herself closer to 5'2" (about 158 cm), apologetically told me it had never occurred to her that that would happen because she had never had a student so tall. Because, of course, she probably hadn't had that many male students, and generally the tallest women are not anywhere near my height.
It is also next to impossible to find yoga clothing designed for and specifically marketed to men. So much so that the New York Times ran an article about this two years ago (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/29/fashion/29CODES.html) that goes into the subject far better than I could here. For myself I have found clothing fit for yoga from other manufacturers.
And this is not for lack of interest on men's part, I think. I am really one of the few men I know of who does yoga on a fairly regular basis who is neither Indian-American nor gay nor into yoga as part of a whole lifestyle (and yes, there are negatively-stereotypable men in yoga, or you wouldn't have the "Ogden the Inappropriate Yoga Guy" comedy videos on YouTube). Granted, I don't live in a large city; maybe the Manhattan or LA yoga communities are a little different, to say nothing of in the UK or Europe (in India, I believe, this is very different).
Last fall I went with my son to a New York Giants U.S. football home game. We came early enough to watch the Giants and the visiting team do their customary pregame workout on the field an hour or so before the game. When the entire Giants team, in full uniforms and pads, began their stretches, the first one they did was the common downward dog yoga pose ([[Adho Mukha Svanasana]] ... we use the Sanskrit names for our articles). That was not part of the standard American football stretches when I played; given that many NFL players have made no secret that they do yoga as a standard part of their conditioning and workout I'm pretty sure that came from that. I would also imagine that yoga classes are not unknown to the players in the UK Premiership, the Bundesliga or Serie A.
[[Tara Stiles]], a somewhat controversial yoga instructor who posts a lot of short videos on YouTube as part of her effort to make yoga more accessible, says she gets lots of emails about those videos from men who enjoy doing the yoga routines in them but wouldn't be caught dead in a yoga studio. It wasn't discussed further, but I know why, and it often seems to me like the elephant in the room in the yoga community. (And I bet some of them would feel more welcome at Ms. Stiles' studio).
It is not my intention in posting this for this to be seen as a complaint, rather as an observation, constituting anecdotal evidence in support of the paper in the post I followed up to that a social subspace can become gendered without any overt signs of gender politics and that it is not just men that can do this. Followups should be limited in scope to this, or its bearing on the present discussion. Any responses specific to yoga should be directed to me personally via email, or brought up on yoga mailing lists or other fora.
*Perhaps because of the gender imbalance of yoga, many women who do it not only have no problem with the feminine form of the word ("yogi") but insist on it. This is about the only instance where I can think of this being so.
Daniel Case