I have been on both sides of this, and I have no idea how it reflects on my dudeness. In my past job, as an industrial training developer, I worked in a similarly predominantly female identifying office, to the point where out of the 9 people on the writing team, I was the only one who identified as a male for a long stretch. This wasn’t bad, or problematic, but I do defintiely see where you are coming from on how much it makes you notice your own dude-ness. It’s not a bad thing, really, and it wasn’t a problem working there, but there was certainly a feeling of minor (as in. not super serious or even important) otherness from the general group.
But then my current job is like 90% dudes, which has had a different effect in that I have ended up being pretty good friends with a few of the women in the office. I think largely this is due to me not relating to the masculine norm of the office really well (it’s consulting, and dudes get hyper competitive; yes, even the super nerdy ones who work here), and feeling relatively separated from it. Part of it I think is largely due to my relative skillset being focused in the liberal arts area, whereas most of the guys in the company are STEM focused, and if you’ve ever read any XKCD, you know what STEM dudes think of liberal arts majors. So I end up being friends with the people who don’t get too STEM-y about shit, who also (thanks to the gender imbalances of the education system?) tend to be female identified. I don’t know, it’s weird.
But it has been a pretty constant thing thoughout my life. I am uncomfortable in large groups of men, something I mostly discovered in high school, which meant figuring that out in the middle of 1500 dudes at a single sex school. But simultaneously, I very much feel my status as a dude (and all that entails) when I am in a group of women. This probably has more to do with my own social anxieties than anything else, but whatever.
And thus concludes another moment of booj staring at his navel.
Oh, probably gonna pick this up soon-ish.