On Wed, Mar 16, 2011 at 21:46, Laura Hale <la...@fanhistory.com> wrote: > I'm going to hold my workshops. I'm going to try to get netball to featured > status... but after that, I've had it. ... [snip]
> How to drive women away from Wikipedia: Belittle their > feelings, imply they aren't people, have influential men in the Wikipedia > community who hold positions of power dogpile on women who express concern > over how you handle the effort to bring more women into Wikipedia, imply > that wanting your own space to work on increasing female participation on > Wikipedia discriminated against 87% of the Wikipedia population, and provide > no leadership or support for women who are actively working towards helping > accomplish stated goals of the organisation to bring in more women, make > women feel guilty for offending men on a list intended to help increase > women's representation on Wikipedia. > Much of my adult life has been spent in communities where all the women in my extended circle were feminists, and many of the men were too. People weren't necessarily militant, but all were politically aware in terms of male-female relationships. Wikipedia was the first community I spent a lot of time in where that was not the case. It was a shock, and I only stayed because I got sucked into it. Here's the conundrum. It's good for Wikipedia to have more women involved. But it's not clear to me that it's good for individual women. It might be in future if the community can be changed. But the women who help to change it are likely to have some poor experiences on the way, and may find themselves damaged. How do we balance those two issues morally? How do we encourage women into a community -- for the good of the community in the long term -- when we know it might not be in those women's individual interests? How can the men on this list help with that situation? One way to help is to let us speak out, even when you strongly disagree and the tone doesn't seem right. Laura kicked up some dust, and that has to happen if the community's going to change. It should be done with care here, because the men on the list are on our side. But just as we don't want men to feel excluded, we don't want women to feel they've spoken out of turn and are being judged. Sarah _______________________________________________ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
