losttime

I'm a female masters student with a fairly conservative (to my surprise) and very old-school advisor. I could be imagining it out of anxiety, but since the start of the current semester, I've noticed that he treats me a little differently from the way he treats his male graduate students. Like, when he's giving us active duties, he'll look at the men when he's talking and not at me, he'll look at them and engage them in discussion when there's a complex topic that's brought up in his seminar, or he'll tell me I shouldn't help with anything involving physical activity. And the other day he showed us all his acknowledgments, and I noticed I was left out even though I played a very big part in that project (my male colleagues were nice enough to stick up for me and he did apologize after that). He is a very nice man so I've been a little hesitant to call what he is doing sexism: I've wondered if it's just that he just doesn't take me seriously as a person. I've put in a lot of effort to do my duties and coursework very well, and I know my male colleagues consider me a really important intellectual partner, so I do have to admit that I'm kind of hurt by the way he has treated me. If it truly is the case that he doesn't take me seriously because I'm a woman, I'm wondering if this will harm me in any way, like if he doesn't write about my contributions in his recommendation letter for my PhD applications. He's a very conservative, pull up your boot straps kind of man, so I think approaching him about this would be a mistake. I kind of feel that there's nothing to do but to ignore it and move on. Does anyone have a similar experience to mine? If so, how did you deal with such a person?