On 11/22/06, Puppy puppy@killerchihuahua.com wrote:
Speaking as a woman who does not even own a blowdryer or curling iron, I concur with Sarah - the cut is everything. I also am closer to losing my temper than at any other time ever on Wikipedia. Keitel, your entire email is insulting in the extreme. No one is claiming women handle all the "serious" articles and men edit only Beer and NASCAR articles. You are taking one tiny stereotype and applying it across the board. I personally use a computer, I am a programmer by trade, and have not touched a curling iron in 30 years. I know men who won't touch a computer. If "most of the women" you know actually have more interest in their hair than in current events, history, the rise and fall of nations, influential novels, paradigms which have reshaped society, etc, all I can say to you is that you need to meet some new women.
--pissed puppy, who doesn't care for stereotypes
I've just read through some of these threads on gender bias and the low numbers of women in arbcom and WP in general.
Like KC-Puppy, I too am a programmer. I recall once at a company where I worked, I was the senior programmer training a new junior programmer who was male. The newly hired vice president approached us to discuss a project and it soon became obvious that he assumed the male programmer was my superior and that I must be his secretary!
I've regularly experienced this sort of gender-bias attitude in a variety of settings, and Wikipedia is not exempt.
Now at Wikipedia, even though gender is more hidden behind ambiguous usernames, there still exists a bit of a boy's club. Editors who don't know me or neglect to notice the "This user is a mother" userbox on my user page often tend to assume the "M" in MPerel likely stands for "Mike" and I get the accompanying slap-on-the-back attempted male-bonding sort of treatment. Often, I find it easier to let people assume I am a "dude", though in doing that, I find myself holding back contributing since I realize of course that I make quite a mediocre male and fall short of the ability to exhibit the predominantly-valued male qualities. For me it's not a matter of being intimidated (I have healthy self-esteem), but it's just that my outlook and approach to problem-solving doesn't fit the dominant male-oriented mold, and I ask myself, why should I waste my time and effort in areas where it isn't valued?
Occasionally an editor who has discovered I am female dismisses me as an air-headed ditz. I was going to provide a link to the most agregious misogynistic example I personally experienced, but it has apparently been deleted, perhaps since it outed my presumed location. Basically I was mercilessly mocked with demeaning sexist ridicule when I tried to address a particular conflict on a talk page from what I consider my more female perspective.
Even without the blatant misogynist trolls, subtle attitudes and assumptions exist that are often presumptive, demeaning and dismissive of women and female ways of looking at things. There is a bias favoring male aggressiveness, although if a female editor exhibits assertiveness she is often treated and labeled as queen bitch and is summarily harrassed and persecuted. I've seen the harrassment that the few prominent females have endured and frankly it has deterred me from being a more active participant or from pursuing any official leadership role as I don't see the need to subject myself to that kind of treatment. I've been a Wikipedian for years but I still continue to regularly put off admin nomination offers because I hesitate to make myself a target.
I think the gender bias problem is bigger (yet perhaps more subtle) than some think.
~Miri not Mike! (MPerel)