[Gendergap] Proposal: Forking gendergap: Main list for women and transgender, sublist for male supporters

[Valerie Aurora]

On Mon, Mar 14, 2011 at 8:37 PM, Angela <beesley at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 15, 2011 at 11:14 AM, Laura Hale <laura at fanhistory.com> wrote:
>> I'd like to propose that the gendergap be forked.  The main list would be
>> for women and transgendered who want to work together to help increase
>> female participation on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia Foundation projects.
>> The fork list would be for male allies who want to work towards a similar
>> goal.
>
> There already is the WikiChix [1] list just for female editors. There
> were two problems with it. One was the difficulties in ensuring only
> females joined, and the other was inactivity. How would a fork of the
> gendergap list avoid those issues?

On the practical side, I founded and administered a women-only list
for several years.  Our method was to make subscription requests
moderated, and only approve requests if the subscriber sent an email
to the list administrator email address explicitly stating, in some
form:

1. I am female.
2. I am interested in $TOPIC_OF_LIST.

As far as we could tell, very few men were interested enough in
eavesdropping on the list to state, even in a private email, that they
were female.  In practice, we ended up with a list where women felt
comfortable participating publicly far more than any of our mixed
gender lists, and for some time it was our highest traffic forum.

As for inactivity, in my experience constructive public discussion
requires curation.  I don't know who has the time and qualifications
to do so, for this list or any forks of it.

-VAL