There are so few women in my industry (sound-mixing) that I am friends with, regularly interact with or have met nearly all of them. It's a profoundly male profession. As such, when dealing with women within my profession I assume there's something spectacular about them or else they wouldn't be doing it - we lost a good one last year who decided she'd rather pursue nursing.

My answers are skewed as a result:

1) I am conscious to treat women with more respect and consideration because off-color jokes and sexualized speech is the baseline due to the near-total lack of women.

2) I presume that any woman I encounter in my profession is likely to be persistent and pretty damn good at her job. There's also the aspect that it's a skillset that rewards an attention to detail and I find that women generally excel at this - there's a reason men don't generally knit.

3) Doesn't really apply - leadership within my profession is either regimented or ad-hoc. Besides which, we're all doing the same job, or different aspects of the same job, and it's rare that you can assume a "leadership role."

4) I've never met a female sound supervisor. A female sound mixer is the leader of the team (mixer, boom, utility) by title and union classification.

5) I am wholly aware of the assumptions I am making, mainly that a woman in a technical position in Hollywood is persistent, skilled and thick-skinned.

6) I'm not sure how this is relevant.

In my opinion, it's important to focus the workshop on women because "ambition" for women extends to family while "ambition" for men is always entirely within the professional sphere. And while men may face confidence and ambition issues, they aren't a systemic part of their gender's presence in the workplace and a workshop setting is better for dealing with endemic practices. A man's confidence and ambition issues are likely to be particular to the man, while a woman's confidence and ambition issues are more likely to be systemic and therefore easier to generalize.