Barbie says, "Conferences are fun!"

For a while now, I have been going to a group to improve my public speaking skills. It's a well known international organisation, but I won't name it here as I don't want this anecdote to negatively influence anyone who might be googling them and thinking of joining. Let's just say that Geekman calls them "Toastgraspers".

Yesterday before the group started, I mentioned I was going to miss the next three meetings, due to being in NZ, and then at a conference. (This will be relevant later, truly).

It was also my turn to give a speech, and the usual format of the meetings means that after each speech one of the other group members gives an oral evaluation of the talk, where they are supposed to give both "commendations" for what was done well, and "recommendations" for what could be improved.

So the evaluation for my speech duly came round, and my evaluator was a middle-aged science professor. He gave the same recommendation I always get, of "slow the fuck down!" (not said in quite those words) and a couple of commendations. Then he finished his evaluation with, "So all in all, a good speech. If you speak like that at your conference, you'll wow all the blokes."

WTF???

I don't know where to even begin deconstructing that.

Does he think that's why female academics go to conferences? To impress men? Or did he mean "the audience in general" and in his personal visualisation/memory of conferences, there are only ever men in the audience? Or is this some sort of Australian use of "bloke" that includes women too? -- kind of like people use "those guys over there" to refer to mixed groups.

Anyone else have any hypotheses? Because to me it seems like serious weirdness.