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From: Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86@comcast.net>
Date: Wed, 16 Mar 2011 16:49:32 -0400
To: Laura Hale <laura@fanhistory.com>
Subject: Re: [Gendergap] Proposal: Forking gendergap: Main list for women and transgender, sublist for male supporters

Laura, your interpretation of my words is strikingly self-serving, and your solutions would serve to widen whatever gap exists in the Project. This entire "problem" is not one of gender, but of individual persons having problems communicating with a particular group of other persons. My question to all of those who state that they have a problem communicating with, or feel intimidated by, a male in the venue of a mailing list such as this, is do you have the same problem in person? There are many, many strong, intelligent voices in the Wikipedia Project who also happen to be female. And to include them in this "gendergap", and suggest that this is strictly a gender issue, is an insult to them.

Marc

on 3/16/11 4:06 PM, Laura Hale at laura@fanhistory.com wrote:

On Wed, Mar 16, 2011 at 11:42 PM, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86@comcast.net> wrote:

This is simply, nonsense!

That is your opinion, and you're welcome to it.  In my experience, there are two general groups of women:

1.  One who welcome men as participants in events specifically targeting women, because the women feel the men can learn.
2.  One who don't want men involved because they feel women should work towards their own self interests and that women behave differently around men.
 

Don't you people realize that separating this List
into two distinct ones would underline, reinforce and actually signify the
very "gendergap" you are allegedly trying to resolve.

This pretty much is why I think we need men off the list.  While you're intending to or not, I'm reading this as "Don't you understand that the only way women can succeed it by having men involved! You need men!"  If you're not intending to send the message: Women cannot succeed with out men!, then you may want to reconsider your wording.

And I'd argue the opposite: Men have done an awful job at recruiting women to be involved with Wikipedia.  The current problems exist because men have tried to "solve" this problem.
 

This is people talking
with people. If there is a female or male here who has a problem
communicating with, or in the presence of, another gender - they do have a
problem.

Translation: "Women! You're the problem!  If you could stop engaging in female modes of communication, we could fix this problem! "

This list is NOT a general list for increasing the participation rates of people.  If you want to have a list dedicated to generally increasing the participation rates of people on Wikipedia, then fork off and do that.

 

But a website Mailing List such as this is not the place to resolve
it.

Am I supposed to interpret this as you claiming that this list has a mission that will never succeed because it acknowledges there are gender differences and different approaches are needed to get different audiences?  As a woman, a representative of a minority group on Wikipedia, how am I supposed to respond to you?  I can tell you that this post of yours makes me feel distinctly uncomfortable posting to this list.  It seems to put men in the position of power above women, demanding that women participate only in male modes of communication, that women on the list can't talk about genuine concerns they have as women because they are going to get blown off, and that feelings of men on the list are more important then women.

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