niht-hræfn wrote:
On Nov 22, 2006, at 6:18, Puppy wrote:
Puppy wrote:
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 didn't mean to imply this. I'm saying coverage of stereotypically "women's" stuff (which many women wouldn't have a problem fixing up) is not optimal. The women that I know who may happen to blowdry their hair or straighten it also have computers and are interested in history and literature. However, they don't edit Wikipedia while some of the men I know do sometimes. I could probably have chosen a better stereotypical subject to harp on... However, more important than our coverage is how inviting we are to female editors, unless we wish to argue that a male-dominated editing body will benefit us most in the end. I think we should be equally concerned with how inviting we are to older editors, more technophobic (if that's a good word) editors, and such.
I wonder though, why [[Menstruation]], [[Menses]], [[Menstruum]], [[Menstrual flow]], etc redirect to [[Menstrual cycle]] instead of having their own articles, with menses just being mentioned (two sentences) and the topics of menstruation near the end of the article, almost as an afterthought.
--Keitei, who cares more about menstruation than your average woman (and who doesn't blowdry her hair and rarely straightens or curls it because the heat is horrible for the hair) _______________________________________________
Now women's health issues is important, and it would concern me should they be neglected. Blow dryers probably gets neglected for the same reason can opener is a stub - it simply isn't that notable a topic compared to WWII, or menstruation. This is not to say that improving and expanding such articles is not desirable - after all, we wish to be the premier source of general information on everything - but it is not due to gender bias, and to imply that it is to me is reinforcing the "woman-as-empty-headed-shallow-person". Why all the variations on "menstrual" point to one article is probably due to the fact that they are so close to synonymous that to split them would be introducing redundancy. The only subjects of which I am aware which are over-subdivided, if you will, are politically or religiously charged subjects. Hence, Abortion is an enormous cascade of articles, because people have strong views, there is a legal debate, a religious debate, etc - but no one is arguing about a woman's menstrual cycle. I could be in error, but that is how it appears to me.
-kc-