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 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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