Puppy wrote:
Women are emailing me telling me how intimidated they feel - they don't want to post their concerns to this list because they also feel intimidated here. That I would have never known had I not replied.
Women feeling intimidated by public mailing lists, and complaining about it in private email, has been going on steadily since I first got on the net nearly 25 years ago. It's an interesting phenomenon for the sociologists - if you look at the subscriber list, you'll see that there are plenty of male lurkers, but of course they don't give their reasons for not speaking up. Once in a great while I've met one of these male lurkers in person, and a couple (almost shamefacedly) admitted to feeling intimidated by the risks of public posting. In any case, this is not unique to WP mailing lists, and as far as I know it's never been satisfactorily resolved for public lists - having a women-only or approved-members-only list is the usual tactic, but then it's not really a public list anymore. Any other ideas that have been tried?
Stan