W asked me to join him and several others on the organizing committee for a research program to take place at a mathematics institute. The pre-proposal, which W and another organizer had already written, was due in a couple of days. My guess is that I was added to the committee at the last minute as its "token woman".
Our proposal was eventually accepted, and it was then our task to choose mathematicians to invite to the program.
I decided that, of the possible reasons to have a "token woman", a positive one was to have someone on the committee reminding us not to overlook mathematicians from traditionally-overlooked demographics who would be a good fit for our program. I decided to take my role as token woman seriously.
But as we tossed around names of people to invite, almost all were male. Mostly co-authors, students, advisors, or friends of my co-organizers and their friends. I was something of an outsider on the committee, since my fields of mathematics were further from our program's field than were those of my co-organizers. So I had more trouble thinking of invitees. I decided to search for ideas using the online database of mathematics publications. But since I was inputting the names of my co-organizers, it output their co-authors, students, etc.
I despaired of finding a way to broaden the demographics of our invitees. Perhaps this was just a field with no women.
I reread our proposal. It was in the form "Our program will study the ramifications of B's paper, on which interesting work has already been done by C, D, and E. We will also explore ways to solve the conjectures of F and G." This confirmed my sense that this field consisted of B through G and their entourages. I was resigned to leave it at that.
As the outsider, I felt insecure about my role in the program. I wondered, "If people ask what the program is about, can I even tell them? I can say the point is to build on the work of B, C, D, E, F, and G. But what if they ask what that means?"
I said to the committee, "Our proposal focuses on the people. But what if we instead focus on the mathematics? What are the mathematical problems we'd like to solve? Rather than saying "the work of B", can we identify the mathematical topics and questions we want to pursue?"
At first, it wasn't easy to rephrase the proposal in terms of the mathematics. But we did. And once we did, we had keywords we could feed into the database. And out popped new names we hadn't thought of. Some were good choices for our invitee list, including some women.
People are interesting. But there are drawbacks to overemphasizing people in place of ideas. Personally, I'd rather that we not name buildings after people. And I'm not a fan of a recent emphasis on people and personalities, rather than mathematics, in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society. Who decides whom to spotlight, and what criteria do they use? This can be problematic.