This NY Times article - "Learning to Love Criticism" by Tara Mohrsept - itself has been criticized for downplaying the negative effects constant criticism has on women; salient quotes: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/28/opinion/sunday/learning-to-love-criticism… /A NEW study by the linguist and tech entrepreneur Kieran Snyder, done for Fortune.com, found two differences between workplace performance reviews given to men and women. Across 248 reviews from 28 companies, managers, whether male or female, gave female employees more negative feedback than they gave male employees. Second, 76 percent of the negative feedback given to women included some kind of personality criticism, such as comments that the woman was "abrasive," "judgmental" or "strident." Only 2 percent of men's critical reviews included negative personality comments.// // //... If a woman wants to do substantive work of any kind, she's going to be criticized --- with comments not just about her work but also about herself. She must develop a way of experiencing criticism that allows her to persevere in the face of it....// // //... For centuries, women couldn't protect their own safety through physical, legal or financial means. We couldn't rely on the law if our safety was threatened. We couldn't use our own money to escape or safeguard ourselves and our children, because we could not own property. Being likable, or at least acceptable to stronger, more powerful others, was one of our primary available survival strategies. For many women around the world, this is still the reality, but all women inherit the psychological legacy of that history. Disapproval, criticism and the withdrawal of others' approval can feel so petrifying for us at times --- life-threatening even --- because for millenniums, it was.// //Add to this history what we see in our time: Powerful women tend to receive overreactive, shaming and inappropriately personal criticism. //... / She then goes on to explore some ways women can adjust their own attitudes to deal with all this criticism. *And while most strategies seem OK, she ignores that womens real work has to be adjusting the mindsets of those males who believe that unrelenting criticism of women is permissible and even laudatory.* Right now on Wikipedia various womens' adjustment strategies or coping mechanisms include: 1) run away from any article where there's criticism; 2) be nice to/ make friends with powerful editors who will protect you from critics; 3) become one of the boys (even if it means not letting them know you are a woman); 4) don't respond to critics and harassers, just build up a record you can take to ANI maybe someday; 5) defend yourself/argue back (and get labeled drama queens and troublemakers); 6) some combination of the above; 7) the most popular option - QUIT! What's the problem and what's the solution? Wikipedia suffers from the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Structurelessness *The current organizational structure (or lack thereof) encourages the most dominating and manipulative males with a strong pro-male/pro-male gang mentality to drive out anyone, male or female, who doesn't hop to their political, policy or other agenda. It's a problem infecting editors, administrators and more and more ArbCom.* The "Tyranny of Structurelessness" essay is a feminist analysis of consensus-oriented groups without formal leaders. It discusses how "this apparent lack of structure too often disguised an informal, unacknowledged and unaccountable leadership that was all the more pernicious because its very existence was denied." I myself like spontaneous order and participatory, consensus oriented democracy, but I've also seen no rules and minimal rules abused by cliques in organizations, activist groups and at Wikipedia. Let's face it, some people are very clique oriented in organization settings. Clique members often are "apparatchiks" - people who may or may not believe in the cause, but definitely believe in getting all the power, perks and privileges out of the organization they can. Both more and less structured organizations always have a fight to keep these cliques from looting the organization and/or pushing through agendas with which the great majority of supporters and participants disagree. Other organizational members reject joining such tight knit clique, though they may make friends or join loose alliances. Others can't help but fight the cliques - and take their punishment for doing so. Their alliances usually aren't as strong as the cliques, til the clique goes too far and then the un-allied and more loosely allied join them, and you have revolution. *GGTF and this email list have enough malcontents to threaten the power of the controlling male-dominated cliques. Thus the massive over-reaction to GGTF.* I haven't studied the Wikimedia Foundation enough yet, or its more unpopular initiatives, to say how its structure and its various cliques either a) effect the drop in editor participation in general or b) really want increased participation by women in a more civil environment (though as I've ranted here and there, I assume it only will become a high priority if there's intense outside pressure on WMF). I do think there are structural things that can be imposed by the Wikimedia Foundation to make reforms happen. (Whether they'll choose the right reforms and the right people to make them happen is a whole 'nother story.) *But the purpose of this thread is not to discuss specific reforms, but to **focus on the issue of male dominated Wikipedia cliques intent on keeping Wikipedia a place where dominant males don't have to put up with these damned women (or "radical feminist c*nts/tw*ats" in/their/ minds) who keep yammering about making Wikipedia a nice (or even safe!) place to edit.* Discussion of some womens' complicity in all this obviously is relevant too. CM