This NY Times article - "Learning to Love Criticism" by Tara Mohrsept -
itself has been criticized for downplaying the negative effects constant
criticism has on women; salient quotes:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/28/opinion/sunday/learning-to-love-criticism…
/A NEW study by the linguist and tech entrepreneur Kieran Snyder, done
for
Fortune.com, found two differences between workplace performance
reviews given to men and women. Across 248 reviews from 28 companies,
managers, whether male or female, gave female employees more negative
feedback than they gave male employees. Second, 76 percent of the
negative feedback given to women included some kind of personality
criticism, such as comments that the woman was "abrasive,"
"judgmental"
or "strident." Only 2 percent of men's critical reviews included
negative personality comments.//
//
//... If a woman wants to do substantive work of any kind, she's going
to be criticized --- with comments not just about her work but also
about herself. She must develop a way of experiencing criticism that
allows her to persevere in the face of it....//
//
//... For centuries, women couldn't protect their own safety through
physical, legal or financial means. We couldn't rely on the law if our
safety was threatened. We couldn't use our own money to escape or
safeguard ourselves and our children, because we could not own property.
Being likable, or at least acceptable to stronger, more powerful others,
was one of our primary available survival strategies. For many women
around the world, this is still the reality, but all women inherit the
psychological legacy of that history. Disapproval, criticism and the
withdrawal of others' approval can feel so petrifying for us at times
--- life-threatening even --- because for millenniums, it was.//
//Add to this history what we see in our time: Powerful women tend to
receive overreactive, shaming and inappropriately personal criticism.
//... /
She then goes on to explore some ways women can adjust their own
attitudes to deal with all this criticism. *And while most strategies
seem OK, she ignores that womens real work has to be adjusting the
mindsets of those males who believe that unrelenting criticism of women
is permissible and even laudatory.*
Right now on Wikipedia various womens' adjustment strategies or coping
mechanisms include: 1) run away from any article where there's
criticism; 2) be nice to/ make friends with powerful editors who will
protect you from critics; 3) become one of the boys (even if it means
not letting them know you are a woman); 4) don't respond to critics and
harassers, just build up a record you can take to ANI maybe someday; 5)
defend yourself/argue back (and get labeled drama queens and
troublemakers); 6) some combination of the above; 7) the most popular
option - QUIT!
What's the problem and what's the solution? Wikipedia suffers from the
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Structurelessness
*The current organizational structure (or lack thereof) encourages the
most dominating and manipulative males with a strong pro-male/pro-male
gang mentality to drive out anyone, male or female, who doesn't hop to
their political, policy or other agenda. It's a problem infecting
editors, administrators and more and more ArbCom.*
The "Tyranny of Structurelessness" essay is a feminist analysis of
consensus-oriented groups without formal leaders. It discusses how "this
apparent lack of structure too often disguised an informal,
unacknowledged and unaccountable leadership that was all the more
pernicious because its very existence was denied."
I myself like spontaneous order and participatory, consensus oriented
democracy, but I've also seen no rules and minimal rules abused by
cliques in organizations, activist groups and at Wikipedia. Let's face
it, some people are very clique oriented in organization settings.
Clique members often are "apparatchiks" - people who may or may not
believe in the cause, but definitely believe in getting all the power,
perks and privileges out of the organization they can. Both more and
less structured organizations always have a fight to keep these cliques
from looting the organization and/or pushing through agendas with which
the great majority of supporters and participants disagree.
Other organizational members reject joining such tight knit clique,
though they may make friends or join loose alliances. Others can't help
but fight the cliques - and take their punishment for doing so. Their
alliances usually aren't as strong as the cliques, til the clique goes
too far and then the un-allied and more loosely allied join them, and
you have revolution. *GGTF and this email list have enough malcontents
to threaten the power of the controlling male-dominated cliques. Thus
the massive over-reaction to GGTF.*
I haven't studied the Wikimedia Foundation enough yet, or its more
unpopular initiatives, to say how its structure and its various cliques
either a) effect the drop in editor participation in general or b)
really want increased participation by women in a more civil environment
(though as I've ranted here and there, I assume it only will become a
high priority if there's intense outside pressure on WMF).
I do think there are structural things that can be imposed by the
Wikimedia Foundation to make reforms happen. (Whether they'll choose
the right reforms and the right people to make them happen is a whole
'nother story.) *But the purpose of this thread is not to discuss
specific reforms, but to **focus on the issue of male dominated
Wikipedia cliques intent on keeping Wikipedia a place where dominant
males don't have to put up with these damned women (or "radical feminist
c*nts/tw*ats" in/their/ minds) who keep yammering about making Wikipedia
a nice (or even safe!) place to edit.* Discussion of some womens'
complicity in all this obviously is relevant too.
CM