On 18/06/12 09:52, koltzenburg@w4w.net wrote:
in my view of the matter, and my thanks to Laura for filling in with a few concrete examples, taking positive action in this context would mean, I guess, to stop talking about any numbers that we might have to consider to be harmful - precisely: harmful for swift and wonderful encouragement for *positive* action
Failing to acknowledge the issue, and document the numbers, is never a good start for positive action.
For example. I'm involved in getting more women involved in Open Source. Although it helps to get more women involved in IT, that's a really slow way of doing it. Both personal experience and research (FLOSSPOLS, the Australian Bureau of Statistics analysis of census data etc) show that the proportion of women who are programmers as part of their job is about 20%. Both personal experience and research (FLOSSPOLS, numerous surveys) show that the proportion of women who participate in open source projects as part of their hobbies is 2-4%. Getting more women involved in IT in general has a very low trickle through. Getting women who are already involved in IT to get involved in Open Source is much more likely to be successful. Except, that many of them have already tried it and been burned.
When the Geek Feminism wiki first started documenting sexist incidences in IT http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Timeline_of_incidents (with an eye to Open Source specifically) I originally felt a bit uncomfortable. I agreed that there should be a list somewhere, but wasn't publishing such a list *harmful* to trying to encourage women who are already in IT to give open source a go? Wouldn't they be turned away? Then I got involved, and I realised that there were a lot of really wonderful men who had no idea how prevalent the problems were. You could remind them of events, and they'd nod, but if you didn't lay it all out, they had no idea how systemic the issue is.
Documenting it all, means that we have somewhere we can point to, and say that's where we've been and where we are now. Are things getting better? It makes it possible for formulate goals.
It's important to document, so that you know what was, what is, and what you're trying to achieve. Not documenting doesn't help minority groups grow. It just means that when crappy things happen, people feel like it must just be them, rather than than realising that it's part of a systemic issue that others are working on.
What is the Gendergap's goal? Specifically. There is an acknowledged problem: the participation in the project, by women, is lower than you'd like. What percentage would you like? What percentage growth do you want to achieve *this year*? Is that even the correct goal? Perhaps you need to make Wikipedia a little less obnoxious to edit first? (You know what I mean. Small edits are fine. Non contentious edits are fine. Introducing new stuff, or making certain material less awful can be incredibly obnoxious.) Perhaps you need to start keeping a log of sexist incidents yourself, so that you can quantify that problem? (These are suggestions)
Once you have a goal you can work out what you need to do, to achieve that.
J