On Tue, Mar 15, 2011 at 4:09 PM, Amy Roth <aroth@wikimedia.org> wrote:

This list is a direct invitation for women to voice the issues they have on Wikipedia and many have done that. It seems to me that the men who are active on this list join the conversation in an effort to find out what issues female editors face and how they can help.

This is my opinion only... but I'm very much for female empowerment. We create our own power. Having men involved as supporters is great but at the same time, I feel some of the male posters are not actually interested in finding out our issues, nor do they seem to be organising events to get female participation to increase. And if I had a male come up to me and say "We want to increase female participation! Join now!" I'd kind of back away... my feeling is that if you need men to be advocates for women in a situation like this, the whole system is so inherently flawed that it isn't worth joining or fixing. If it really was great, then they'd have female spokes people, they'd have women doing these things. My personal opinion is male involvement hurts credibility in the movement, and female leadership brings credibility to it.

Plus, the ratio of male posting to female posting for a while was kind of very "What's going on here? I thought this list was trying to encourage women to become involved with Wikipedia and something has failed because even on the list dedicated to the topic, men continue to dominate the conversation."

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