On 5/16/2011 2:46 AM, Sarah Stierch wrote:
This gap does exist, in fact an entire mailing list (which I have cc'd
here and I encourage anyone interested in the topic to join) was
created to work towards bridging this gap. This was triggered by an
article titled "Define Gender Gap? Look Up Wikipedia's Contributor
List" by Noam Cohen, published Jan 30 2011 in /The New York Times/:
First I agree the image wasn't appropriate, and my reason would be
that the WMF has a very broad audience. WMF sites are frequently used
in K-12 education, and although they aren't perfectly family friendly,
people don't complain a lot because pictures of strange genital
piercings don't get shoved in your face when you're looking for
something else.
In the last ten years there's been a lot of literature from Japan
about how people react to this sort of image -- Saito Tamaki's book
"Beautiful Fighting Girl" makes the case that the kind of desire people
have for these images is a little bit queer, largely because of the
visceral reaction that other people have to this desire. Hiroki Azuma's
book "Otaku: Japan's Database Animals" is also important.
As for the "Why don't women do X?" narrative, this is selfish
meme, much like the memes that are embedded in that image. It's a
psuedoconversation that circulates endlessly but never goes anywhere and
never comes to a conclusion. It gives people the feeling that feminism
is present (if not women), and displaces other narratives that are
actually dangerous. One of the reasons I quit my membership of the ACM
was that I couldn't stand the endless hand-wringing pseudo-dialogue
about perceived problems in the academic computer science community that
circled around an elephant in the room that nobody could talk about.
It's generally a mistake to study an absence because there isn't
anything to study. There are two good questions you could ask (1) "What
motivates a small fraction of men to do X?" and (2) "What do women do
all day?" Both of these are dangerous. (1) suggests that "men who do
X" are defective, strange, queer, not quite right. The other one (2)
is the black hole of feminism, a question that, if it could be talked
about, means we'd have a women's movement, not an anti-anti-abortion
movement and a collection of selfish memes,.
These discourses of lack ~are~ dangerous because they've handed
political control of the West to the right wing. The system can
tolerate an "academic left" that curates a carefully selected collection
of selfish memes that call attention to certain absences and make other
absences invisible.
One major issue in our culture is that the vast majority of people
belong to a voiceless social class. You'll find that a very specific
strata of people, in terms of class and ethnicity, write editorials
for papers like the New York Times. Certain kinds of people are in
academia, always asking "Why don't women do X?"
Other people don't get their stories told, and rather have their
stories made up of them to them by people of other classes and
ethnicities. They're a shadow that the articulate class only sense
every November when they pull the Republican lever.