Stan Shebs wrote:
charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
Stan Shebs wrote
The hazard of asserting that women editors have something similarly distinctive to bring to WP, by virtue of gender alone, is that one is playing right into the stereotype of "women's topics" or "female viewpoints", and risks creating a sort of "pink collar" ghetto in WP that new female editors would be subtly (or not-so-subtly) steered towards.
The argument is broken.
Sure, creating the editorial equivalent of traditional newspapers' Women's Pages is not only a generation out of date and patronising, it is nothing anyone with WP experience would want anything to do with.
But WP is a voluntary organisation, first and foremost. Discouraging women in any way is shooting ourselves in the feet, big time. Not just because slant in topic coverage will be harder to correct. But because women are (on average) better quality volunteers. Why else did we elect Angela and Anthere to the Board?
I absolutely agree. I'm speaking purely to the systemic bias point, valiantly trying to stay on-topic for this thread. :-)
My gut feeling on this is that there is some systemic bias in topics of interest to women, but that it's subtle and going to be hard to write down as a project a la Africa coverage. As I mentioned earlier, our right person to write in depth about blowdryers is not the daily user who has only anecdotal unsourced comments to relate, but the nerd who collects books on the subject or the retired engineer who used to design them - but how do you advertise the interest without getting into a big fight about stereotypes? Nobody gets accused of any -ism for building up a list of Gabon-related topics.
Stan
It appears to me there are two topics here (worth staying on, anyway): systemic bias as regards articles, which I don't see specific evidence of, although along with Stan I have a bit of a "gut feeling" about, although I entered this thread to protest Blowdryers as a "woman's" topic. The second topic on this thread could be categorized as subtle discouragement of women in general, which I didn't realize existed until this thread. I agree with Fred that dialogs can be productive, and while I have no clue as to any bias in coverage or methods to address them, I feel we have made some progress on looking at and trying to resolve the issue of overall subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) bias against women contributors. I have no diffs to offer, as someone requested - I personally have not experienced much sexism, but that may be because so many people think I'm male.
-kc-