It's quite hard to make meaningful generalizations about Occupy - even
ignoring the initial diversity, the different circumstances of each
occupation (especially the local political reaction to it) has made for
quite different groups.
Most of my experience is with bay area occupy groups - occupy oakland,
occupySF, and occupy cal. All three are a bit weird, because the bay area
as a whole is incredibly liberal and at the same time local politicians
and law enforcement have been way more aggressive in trying to disband the
camps than has been true in most of the rest of the country. There's a
very solid chance that my experiences don't generalize well to other
occupations.
There are several distinctly different groups of people involved in Occupy
events, and the gender ratios differ substantially between them.
In the bay area, I have found that the gender ratio during the day or
early evening is pretty close to even - in at least one of the major
police actions I accidentally got stuck in, there were substantially more
women than men. Many marches and daytime convergences are 50/50 or even
more female than that.
Men do speak more than women at the general assemblies, although there are
quite a number of very active women at them too. The modified consensus
system that GA's use doesn't scale well and is susceptible to the same
kind of problems that occur on Wikipedia. GA's are irritating enough that
I generally avoid speaking up - and for any of you familiar with me irl or
how I act on-wiki, that's a pretty impressive thing for me to say, heh. I
suspect that women are driven away from GA's for the same set of reasons
that Wikipedia is distasteful to some.
Definitely more men sleep in the camps than women. Part of this may be
that a decent number of the people who bring tents long term to Occupy
were homeless or transient to begin with - and most people who fall in to
that group in the US are men. Most of the rest I would think is because
sleeping in a tent in a city center is not an attractive proposition to
many women because of a (unfortunate but not entirely unwarranted) fear of
crime.
The local government of Oakland has stated that there have been (I think)
two sexual assaults in the encampment before it was disbanded that were
reported to the police (via 911 calls from inside the camp.) Some people
are skeptical of these claims, because requests for access to the taped
calls have been rejected (911 calls - even for sexual assault - are public
records here) and there have been no details released about the victims
(and no one knows who they are.) There was also one murder near the
encampment that involved people who had at least transiently passed
through the camp.
Unfortunately, none of these crimes surprise me given the location they've
occurred in - the only murder I've personally witnessed occurred within a
couple blocks of the encampment (a year or two before occupy, though) and
it's an exceedingly high crime area in general. Oakland has the 4th
highest violent crime rate of any American city. If anything, honestly,
I'm surprised that there have been so few reported crimes.
Most of the inappropriate behavior that I have seen (especially gendered
or racialized stuff) has been dealt with fairly quickly by bystanders.
Openly sexually harassing someone at a bay area occupy will get you a
swift boot to the ass from a bystander - much swifter than I have seen in
any other setting. And I do mean a literal boot - people have been way
more ready to aggressively intervene when they see something going wrong
at most occupy events that I've been to than in any other context I've
seen.
Although I haven't been to occupy LA, one of my good friends has. Her
experiences were massively more negative than her experiences in the bay
have been - tons of people either aggressively hitting on her or warning
her that other people were going to be aggressively hitting on her.
Admittedly she only spent a couple evenings there so she may have just had
exceedingly bad luck - but if what she saw was representative of occupy
LA, then they have a lot more problems than the bay area ones do. Some of
the comments made to her there would have resulted in immediate
intervention by bystanders at occupyoakland.
tl;dr - Occupy is a pretty much a microcosm of society in many ways.
Because it does attract an unusually liberal/progressive demographic
problems that do come up are often handled more appropriately and
aggressively than they would be in most other settings, but because it is
drawing people from American society and not an ideal place, it still does
have substantial gender issues.
---
Kevin Gorman
user:kgorman-ucb