[Gendergap] A pet peeve / cliche

[Miguelinito]

[I'm resending this message because it wasn't well formatted before.]

I'm glad I made you comment on me. That means -in my opinion- that you're concerned,
and that also means that maybe I hit on the wound.

As I said in an earlier post, in a capitalist system women play men's roles. That's not bad,
of course, that just means that they are changing their nature to be "equal" to men. In China
happend just the opposite: men changed their nature to be "equal" to women. Have you ever
had a row with a Chinese man? And I mean a Chinese man with a Chinese mentality, not
somebody who adapted to the capitalist system.

For me those things are clearer because I'm living just in the middle of the two worlds, i.e.,
China and the United States.

What would it be the solution? Maybe, a middle point, just what happened in the
famous Spanish story of Don Quixote: they changed themselves reciprocally.

Of course, this is an utopia. Who am I to change the world? I'm not important :)

Regards

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
(ORIGINAL MESSAGE)

Second, Miguel,

Thank you for pointing out that the gender gap 
exists all over the world. 

You propose the Wikipedia site itself might be a problem, 
because women don't want to work with it because
it isn't WYSIWYG.  <*sigh*>
The reasons being:

1. "men are a bit more obsessive in their work than women"
2. "maybe it's the look of the site, not attractive enough"  
3. "women tend to focus their attention on people, instead of things, as men do"

#1 & #3 have been stated about women and work for over a century.

#2 --> Has a woman *actually* told you that she won't post to 
Wikipedia because she finds the interface too difficult? 
You're proposing that women don't want to post as experts 
because they don't want to be an expert in using a complex interface.
Because of a deficiency with women, they don't want to become
experts with a system that would allow them to post their
expert opinion.
I sense a catch-22 argument here.
Reworking the Wikipedia interface is not really addressing the problem.

Another reason why "women don't want to ____ because ______"
We should have a Wiki page on these bizarre reasons.
If we put them in a long list it might not help anyone, but
it might be humorous.  We could just refer to reason #1054
or #782 or #11659 with links to the Wiki page.  Good for
a laugh.  Women could post any new funnies, like "women 
aren't as obsessive about their work as men are".
This might become the most popular set of pages on Wikipedia.
Of course, it would probably attract trolls. So let's not.

To have a serious response to the problem, let's have a 
'Women Post to Wiki' month, and have a banner
about it on every Wiki page during the month.  It validates that 
the world community accepts women as experts, and invites 
women to post who may have thought about it before, but didn't. 
I love that Google has different logos every day. Wiki 
can have a different logo for that month.

- Susan Spencer Conklin





-- 
Saludos,
 Miguelinito                            mailto:miguelinito at gmail.com