Message: 2 Date: Tue, 19 Jun 2012 08:02:39 +1000 From: Laura Hale laura@fanhistory.com To: Increasing female participation in Wikimedia projects     gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Gendergap] what follows from "most editors do not     gender-identify" Message-ID:     CAGaPgkTx2HgWR1CkYuMmSTtmpnY5WawBeBpfQE6abVXnj0xxDw@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"

On Tue, Jun 19, 2012 at 1:29 AM, Adam Wight spam@ludd.net wrote:

...

IMO, recruiting more women editors is an excellent way to combat that bias, because it doesn't presuppose we know how to fix the problem... only that we know some people who can do the job.

At the end of the day, I'd need to see data which supports this as a theory.  I've been involved in the fan fiction writing community for more years than I would care to count before taking a two year break.  The community probably has the inverse gender proportion of English Wikipedia. One of the CONTINUAL problems is that women do not write about female characters.  They often ignore them.  More women write male/male erotica inside the female dominated fan fiction community than women write female/female erotica.  (And in some communities, female writers of male/male fan fiction outnumber the female writers of male/female fan fiction inside a specific fan community.)  I know of a few female contributors who edit sport articles, but rarely edit women's sport articles.

Do you have any data to back up the theory that women will write women's content?

This is a good point. I wonder if it's a matter of the women most likely to be feminism-aware, or assertive enough, to forge ahead into non-traditional roles, also being inclined towards a tendency to shun female-oriented topics in favour of doing something like entering the male sphere to write about men's topics? Back when female journalists were relegated to the pink ghetto female-interest columns, with the Agony Aunt stuff and the recipe column, they struggled to get different assignments. And women fiction writers were only acceptable if they wrote children's books and the like. I think perhaps some women writers are caught in a bind, they don't want to be confined to fluffy female-oriented topics like Spring fashions, but then on the other hand, they don't want to be pigeon-holed as a "feminist", and then get stereotyped by other writers or editors as a "feminazi" who can't write about anything beyond that. Being labelled as a vocal feminist is

still pejorative to many people, there's a definite stigma in certain circles, and it's tough to break out of that double bind predicament.

I just want to add a suggestion that I haven't seen really discussed, and that is the idea of supporting more diversity among male editors as a way of making an encyclopedia that would be more inviting for potential female editors. It's a lot harder, if not impossible, for women to make much progress in growing their numbers without male supporters who aren't afraid to be vocal when they see a need, and help bridge that gap... Just because there are topics about women that haven't been written yet, doesn't mean they necessarily have to be started by an editor identifying as female.

In the long run, however, it will be mostly women who will write articles on topics of particular concern to women. I recall adding info to the Dowry article, I cited a source that discussed how dowry killings gained more coverage in India's newspapers when they began hiring more female journalists in the 1970s. Hard news articles on women's issues are most often suggested by female journalists and female editors, at least that is my anecdotal impression. I think it was the Ladies' Home Journal that was once entirely edited by men, until a group of feminist writers staged a revolt in the 1970s and had women brought into the magazine's editorial board....must look that up, and perhaps add the info to WP if it isn't there yet.