Ah, I use this as my main source of gender gap news, so maybe I just
don't know what's going on because it's not being reported here. (I
did read here about Ada Lovelace events, and I saw it mentioned in at
least one media outlet, but not more than that).
But I'm confused as to why the WMF would move away from efforts to
address the gender gap. I think it's great that you and others are
devoting your free time and resources to this, but wouldn't it be more
effective to allow someone to devote an experts full professional time
to it? That person could also be a liaison to any usergroup or
affiliate that gets set up, and an advocate within the WMF to allocate
resources with the gender gap in mind.
One thing that's been discussed is the environmental challenge that
Wikimedia projects present which particularly effect women, so why not
spend some time developing sustained protected channels for
collaboratively generating content to be submitted? Polished
submissions are far less likely to be deleted or trashed, and it might
mitigate a lot of the problems with difficult personalities. That's
just spitballing, I'm sure most subscribers to this list could up with
many more and better ideas for really potentially meaningful impact.
Fundamentally, the WMF has a ton of money and has dedicated a huge
amount of effort and infrastructure to giving it away. Sue has
publicly argued that a lot of that money isn't necessarily being well
spent, so when there are such clear opportunities to address what
really is a core flaw for Wikimedia projects... why not push funding,
resources and brains towards them? I'd love to see a "Wikimedia
Campaign" to close the gender gap that has the status of a strategic
initiative. It seems particularly appropriate for something like that
to form one small, lasting part of Sue's legacy as ED.