On Tue, Jul 31, 2012 at 4:56 AM, Risker <risker.wp@gmail.com> wrote:

While this does not directly relate to the Wikimedia gender gap issues, I thought many on this list would find the attached news article, which appeared in The National Post (a Canadian Toronto/national newspaper) , to be of interest. Perhaps we can draw some lessons from it, in particular the treatment of women/women's issues as less important than men/men's issues.

http://sports.nationalpost.com/2012/07/29/london-2012-steps-toward-gender-equality-steps-backward-at-olympics/

Risker/Anne

Regarding the bit about Australia's basketball team: My understanding from talking to people inside Australia's basketball community of why the women went economy plus instead of business class was an issue if priorities. The Australian women spent the money on development and practicing and playing together as a team. They were in training camps two to three months out. Lauren Jackson did not play with her professional team in the USA for the part of the season in order to dedicate herself better to the chase for gold.

Did you hear any stories about how Patrick Mills left the NBA early in order to spend more time training with the national team in order to try to get gold? No. Of course not. The men are not expected to win gold. They don't want to hold early training camps. No one expects them to win even medal. The Australian question should be: Why are we even bothering to send the men? They should sit home. The Australian media largely does not care about them.

The bigger Australian gender stories are actually Michelle Jenneke's butt jiggle, (which ironically, the USA paid more attention to then Australia) and Leisel Jones fat story, which was a very deliberate story on the part of the Australian media. Media watch shows how this story was crafted: http://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/transcripts/s3556770.htm/

That said, Wikipedia's main page has generally been dominated by female Olympians instead of male Olympians on Did You Know. If you want to submit for DYK about women, I highly urge you to. It is one of the best ways to highlight topics that might otherwise get overlooked because of systematic bias.

Sincerely,
Laura Hale

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