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.html?_r=0
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