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

[Laura Hale]

On Tue, Mar 15, 2011 at 2:37 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?
>


Is the purpose of WikiChix to increase female participation on Wikipedia or
does it have a different goal?  My understanding is that gendergap and
wikichix have two different missions.

I don't necessarily have a problem with men joining the list.  My own issues
are male involvement as participants.  Fantastic that they want to help
increase women's participation on Wikipedia.  It is a great goal.  I just
don't think that you can successfully get female participants (with the
general goal being increase female participation, not say increase educator
participation or sport participation) that is dependent on male
involvement.  My experience has been that men and women have different
responses.  It can be a bit nerve wracking to post to the list, because I'm
worried about saying things that will offend men.  I don't feel as free to
participate as I might otherwise would if men weren't involved as
participants.

The issue of inactivity on this list could be dealt with by having an
administer who will try to post often.  What events are being planned?
Wikipedia4Women is doing things.  I'm trying to do my own thing.  There is a
group in New York doing things.  RecentChangesCamp tries to do things.
These can be starting points.  It's a matter of having an admin commit to
that.

Beyond that, I feel like it would be much easier to get participation on the
list if it could be defined less as a space for general conversation about
general wiki issues (which, when men start participating in general
discussion, that's what it feels like it devolves to for me) but about
having a safe space where women can be advocates, talk about what they are
doing, talk about their plans.  I feel that the list should be about
empowering women to empower other women to get involved.

The men can have their own list, where they are free to discuss.  All
current list members can be moderated, asked to identify their gender to the
admin and if they are female, given unmoderated access to the list.  If they
are male, they can be urged to join the men's list or informed that they
won't be allowed to post but they are free to watch.


Sincerely,
Laura Hale


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