On 12/27/2011 4:20 AM, Béria Lima wrote:
Return food for thought:
Inferiority is not always something you feel because of a problem that you have wrong inside you. Often times, there are systematic problems that help reinforce this. Some people have categorically treated as inferior. Having a male suggest this is all in the minds of female contributors is not a useful contribution to the conversation because it devalues the experiences of female contributors on this list, on a list dedicated specifically to fixing these problems. We want to empower female contributors and leaders. We want them to go back to their communities and help work towards increasing overall participation to Wikimedia projects and female participation to Wikimedia projects.
Or as I would have put it, most men don't know what it's like to be constantly insulted, denigrated, bullied, ignored, even if in subtle fashion. Really short, really ugly, gay/transgender/bi, super nerdy guys may know what it's like in adolescence, but when they mature and if they gain skills that make them financially successful even many of them will finally be allowed to join the "manhood" club, one of whose pass keys is denigrating women. All this doesn't necessarily make women feel inferior. But it may make women depressed, prone to lose onesself in female addictions (food, kids, clothes, etc), unfocused, passive, or on the other hand angry, destructive, revengeful, drama queeny (yeah!), etc etc.
Dismissing real and valid concerns does not help: It hurts. A man quoting a woman to dismiss valid concerns makes it worse. I know that was probably not your intent. I know you probably did not intend to cause additional hurt by dismissing valid concerns.
Your analysis is more generous than mine :-)
If we want to fix this problem, we need to remember this. If we have women saying "I am having trouble connecting to this list. I do not feel it represents my interests. The primary focus is on articles of interest to a narrow audience," then we need to work to be more inclusive. I'd love to know more about what is happening in regards to women's related content on French Wikipedia, efforts being made by the community to increase female participation on various Wikimedia Foundation projects, the quality of women's related content on French Wikipedia. We don't often have a chance to hear this narrative. There are 115 million native speakers of the language and around 270 million people who can speak it. It is the official language in some 29 countries around the globe including France. France ranks ninth in the amount of visitors to English Wikipedia. French Wikipedia accounts for 4.7% of traffic to ALL language Wikipedia. There is a huge potential to grow the female participation rates and the general French speaking participation rates on Wikimedia projects.
How can we support this? How can we use the list to support contributors who do not speak English? What steps can we take to make sure we are more inclusive? One of the failings of the gender gap list is we so rarely do that. :(
Another idea - Someone could always post things in french and then link to google translate :-)