Regarding the question of "what can you do",
I had the experience last week of starting a new job.
I had to read through the guidelines for the organization,
which included a section on Equal Opportunity and Freedom from Harassment.
Prominent on the first page:
"Harassment Defined
1. Hostile Environment
Harassment prohibited under this policy includes verbal, visual, or physical conduct relating to matters of race, national origin, sex, sexual preference, religion, age or disability which is unwelcome to the reasonable person, and
a. has the purpose or effect of interfering with a person's work performance
b. has the purpose or effect of creating an intimidating, hostile or offensive working environment. "
Item 2 goes on to deal with more direct incidents such as "unwelcome sexual attention, sexual advances," etc.
I also looked at the relevant page on Wikipedia, to see what Wikipedia's policy is.
(Sorry I don't have the link to hand to include.) It covered item 2.
But "Hostile environment", item 1 on my workplace's guidelines,
is not included.
Note too that item 1 is not limited to sexual materials;
this is not identified as a "feminist problem" but as a type of behavior
potentially relevant and unacceptable to anyone.
I would suggest that one reason that it's hard to get people to address
this sort of situation is that it's not clearly identified at a high level as unacceptable
behavior which creates a "hostile environment"
A very interesting point, which reminded me of "The Benevolent Dictator Incident":
Wikimedia has a "friendly space" policy for physical meetings, but apparently no exact equivalent for its online environment.
To give an example, Commons has a "hot sex barnstar", present on a number of user talk pages, which does not appear to have violated any Wikimedia policy, judging by its existence for more than a year now. The imagery is grossly pornographic, and would be unacceptable in almost any workplace outside of the adult entertainment industry:
Similar imagery is sometimes found on user pages.
It is widely accepted that the open display of pornographic photographs or drawings is a key contributor to a sexually hostile workplace. This is something that could have been addressed as part of the Foundation's terms of use:
However, the present terms of use appear to permit anything that is not outright illegal. If the Wikimedia Foundation is serious about addressing the gender gap, why does it not apply customary workplace standards to its online environment?
