On 6 June 2015 at 18:32, Zana Strkovska <777.zana@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi everybody,

Thank you Anne for mention "only one woman candidate for FDC this year", it was me.
I would like to say something: not time, not money is issue for me (I am free lancer, meaning I can manage my time). My theory is that I didn't pass because I didn't answer questions in the way the community wanted.

I am not sure how many woman we have who are free to help, serve and travel. But, what I found discourage after mine failure is the oppose votes. One thing is to see how many Wikipedians voted for you, but it's not so pleasant to count oppose votes.

I hope my words could help on why women aren't generally volunteering to run.

Regards,
Zana
(user:Violetova)

Zana - I would really like to encourage you to post that at the election post-mortem page, perhaps in the section about voting methodology (which is titled "Electoral system").[1] Your perspective, as a candidate, is really important on this issue. I have said for a while now that I am unlikely to ever participate in another WMF-related election, but it was only on reading what you wrote here that I realized how demoralizing the opposes are in any of these elections for me as well.

Risker/Anne

[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections_2015/Post_mortem