Furthermore, How do we build a place where a-gender non binary persons feel accepted and welcome?

Thank you for your detailed answer. In fact what you mentionned in the second part of your mail, the fact that such events might exclude certain class of people and suggest gender favoritism is what fuelled remarks in the first place. This is what surprized me most, because this is what women experience when contributing: being faced with an environment that is essentially male represented. But that does not prompt aggressivity from the underepresented part does it?

Research has shown that things become easier for an underrepresented community when it achieves a representation of 30% within a group. Then things change "naturally". However there is not only the question of women : how do we become more inclusive with communities that would never make it to a 30% reprensentation level?

There is also an ambiguity here: to adress gender gap, identified along gender based criteria, we apply gender bases approaches : more articles on women, designing more women friendly events, designing gender targeted projects... There is the risk to be assigning women further to a specific gender segregation, and to exclude non binary persons.

But how do we increase the participation of women without implicitely applying gender criteria? It is not possible, we need to start somewhere.

Furthermore, How do we build a place where a-gender non binary persons feel accepted and welcome?

To me it would seem natural to start with an editathon with non binary- only persons, to make sure my biaised approach does not impact the result... But I am not going from the outside to impose a way of doing things. If an agenda is set, it needs to be done by themselves, trying to be inclusive means listening to what people are asking for, not trying to impose a way of doing things from another perspective which would not be representative.

In this the word "start with" is important, we are speaking of building confidence in a secure space where one can build a contributing capacity before being thrown in the vast melting pot of contributors.

To me, trying to deal with women representation, it felt like difficult to try to understand the whole thing from the trans perspective which was brought to me. But I must admit that I learnt so much, that the experience was worth it. I still consider myself as biased, but willing to try hard to be more inclusive. This also goes with starting things by bringing an agenda in my practice that is not mine.

So this is why the project "les sans pagEs" (without a page) does not include the word woman. We can then focus on people and subjects which are not represented. A contributor proposes articles on female horses, and there was one on the irish X case (on the subject of abortion). People then can move away from biographies and start thematic articles (harder to write but helping to link orphan articles, another aspect of the gender gap). We even have a section for articles translated in other languages, because we area global movement. A young italian contributor participating to our group discovered he could not translate "LGBT swiss history" in italian because of the use of "explicit language" (probably the word "sodomy" used in the article, which is based on historical facts).

I have more questions than answers to these issues. One thing I am sure of, is that we need to do things with a learn-and-try agile method with an open mind. I hear too often "we need more research" and I dont think so: I think we need more action and feedback from active contributor groups. We need to share experiences, we need to travel and see how things are done elsewhere. I was happy to meet the mexican women group in Geneva and hear from their experience: we changed our workshops after that. I was happy meeting Rosie in Esino Lario and copying her concept of Women in red in the francophone wikipedia. This brought more than the hundred of research papers I read because it dealt with "how to" instead of "why is it". Reading about the constant underrepresention of women can be very depressing, starting to get things moving is more motivating (poke to the Kaylana effec).

And what I feel we need most of all is a certain lattitude to explore different ways of doing things without being constantly criticized and harrassed. Harrassment is time consuming and destroys all positive energy.

Have a nice week-end!

Le 27 mai 2017 à 06:44, Pine W <wiki.pine@gmail.com> a écrit :

Hi Natacha,

I just now got this email (perhaps it was held for list moderation) but thought I would note that there have been gender-specific events before. I'm aware of the WikiWomen's lunch which seems to be held yearly at Wikimania, and I believe that Wikimedia Mexico has women-only editathons.

As a male I have no objections to gender-specific events happening on occasion. I think that it's fine to have those kinds of sessions so long as they are designed and resourced in ways that are arguably fair and don't suggest favoritism. I would be concerned if such events happened in a way that excluded certain classes of people on a regular basis in a way that seemed designed to deny them access to resources or personal connections which might be of interest to them, if resources were assigned to one group and not another in a way that suggested gender-based favoritism, etc.

In the situation that you described, setting up one event out of four to be gender-specific sounds reasonable to me.

You might consider talking to organizers of previous WikiWomen's lunches and/or the Wikimedia Mexico women's editathons to see if they have comments.

Writing as a male member of this list,

Pine

On Thu, Apr 13, 2017 at 10:48 AM, Natacha Rault <n.rault@me.com> wrote:

Hi everyone,

I would like to starts a discussion on women only events. How are they perceived and do they generate antagonism? I have always organized mixed events, until the first of march 2017, where an Art+feminism editathon was hosted by an LGBT lesbian association in Geneva, and I announced it on the French Bistrot here (among other Art+Feminism events that were all inclusive)

I did not want to impose other rules than theirs on their surroundings,so I announced a woman only event for one of the 4 events organized. Some members of the community disagreed and reacted strongly (although I can’t say all were extremely respectful this is just normal bread when dealing with the gender gap) but one was so stunning and persistant (he was blocked in the end and now has a topic ban) that this generated the thought that we might need to reflect more on safe spaces and organize such events more systematically, in each conference and each Wikimania, until this is no issue any more. I remember attending the women only picnic at Wikimania in Esino Lario and being confronted with a different attitude: there it only seemed normal.

What do you think and what is your experience on this issue? I am interested to know all points of vue provided they are formulated with respect.

Nattes à chat (mostly active on les sans pages on the French wiki)