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

[John Vandenberg]

On Thu, Mar 17, 2011 at 5:01 AM, Steven Walling <swalling at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Mar 16, 2011 at 7:10 AM, <carolmooredc at verizon.net> wrote:
>>
>> men post two to four times as much as women (depending on the
>> week), with some men posting a couple times a day.
>
> So, perhaps ironically, we're having a problem with participatory inequality on the gender gap mailing list.
> A power law of individual participation is a natural part of any open forum on the Web. It just seems like, just as on Wikipedia, we want to swing the distribution toward more women as well as men.

;-)

> Maybe we should edit the Code of Conduct as a first step to try and explicitly encourage the kind of participation what we want.[1]
> Perhaps guys leaving the floor open a bit more for women would help. ("Ladies first" as part of the code of conduct? Is that joke too meta to be effective?) I don't think it can hurt to try anyway.
> I think it's going to take a lot more than men being quieter though.

Suggestions to tame the men.

moderation:
1. put all men on moderation, with a female moderator approving their posts, or
2. put on moderation any man who posts more than three times per calendar week

artificial/self-imposed/self-inflicted controls:
1. no threads started by men, and
2. one post per man per thread unless subsequent responses address
them specifically, by name.

--
John Vandenberg