Re: [Gendergap] Women only events ?

Hi Pine, 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! Natacha