I'm on vacation right now and lack the capacity to respond right now - but
Karen I do have this experience. I will share soon with you.
I have had some super classic "men behaving badly" things happen to me at
WMNYC events. Mainly with older participants (people old enough to be my
grandfather!).
More soon. Stay strong!
Sarah
On Jun 25, 2013 12:24 AM, "Katherine Casey"
<fluffernutter.wiki(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
So, to spin off from the post to this list this
morning about women being
heckled at a Wikimedia NYC meetup, I want to see if I can get a discussion
started about chapter meetups and friendly spaces. This is long, but advice
is desperately needed, so I'd appreciate people taking the time to read and
offer any insight they have.
I've been discussing the
Medium.com
story<https://medium.com/better-humans/11acd4a7f44c> with
some members of WMNYC tonight, and it's becoming apparent that the heckling
*did *happen, pretty much as described, and that while no one thinks what
happened that day was right, no one knows what to do about it, either.
Wikimedia NYC has had some ongoing problems with women being treated oddly
at their events (men staring/leering at women, and now men heckling women),
and the chapter seems to be at a loss about how to deal with these issues
at an institutional level. The best solution that's been tried so far has
been targeted only at a particular person, with another man following the
known ogler intending to intervene if he's noticed ogling, but of course
men tend to quite understandably not be attuned to what behaviors make
women uncomfortable, and people who are being watched tend to behave while
being watched. At best, anyway, this solution can only address the behavior
of a single person, and then only if a) we have the manpower to supervise
the person and b) the watcher notices the behavior and c) the water
actively intervenes to stop the behavior before it impacts an innocent
meetup-goer or goers. This can't even begin to touch the issue of heckling
or aggression toward women at a room- or meetup-level.
It's not enough. Wikimedia NYC is struggling with a lack of manpower at
the best of times that makes it hard to have active moderation of events to
prevent behavior like the heckling described in the
Medium.com story and
the unwanted attention I, among others, have been subjected to. There is
also, in my personal view, a fair amount of institutional apathy from some
- and only some, I want to make clear - of the chapter board and members
which has made it difficult for anything to get done about this issues. I
can't speak for other women in the chapter, but I've started staying away
from events because I come away from them feeling...slimed.
Does anyone have experience implementing friendly space policies,
especially in situations where volunteers numbers are extremely limited?
How can we make these chapter meetups less offputting to women? If a
chapter either can't or won't enforce friendly spaces for itself, is there
any recourse above the chapter level?
-Fluff
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