On Thu, Mar 17, 2011 at 5:01 AM, Steven Walling swalling@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Wed, Mar 16, 2011 at 7:10 AM, carolmooredc@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