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

[Laura Hale]

On Thu, Mar 17, 2011 at 8:04 AM, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com>wrote:

>
> I would like to hear more from other women here on your impressions of
> and responses to Erik's comments.
>
>
>

I showed Erik's comment to a friend who works at an agency.  He thought it
was an unwise comment to make, *especially *given the purpose of the list.
Erik made it about Erik and not the mission.

I showed it to another female acquaintence.  I explained the purpose of the
list.  The response was basically: Erik is entitled to Erik's feelings but
in the context of the purpose of the list, Erik's proposal was completely
inappropiate.  Another female acquaintence I showed it to told me that :
There we go again.  Another case of Mansplaining.

I encourage everyone on the list to share the comment with women they know.
Explain that Wikipedia has a gender gap, with 87% of its contributors being
male.  Explain that WMF created a mailing list to try to overcome this
gendergap and get more women involved, and that the purpose of the list is
to develop strategies to get more women involved.    Then share them Erik's
posts and ask them if Erik's post mirrors that mission, if they would join
the list in response.  Because the women I've talked to sure as heck
wouldn't.  (And then offer the context that a woman asked about making the
list for women only, in an effort to empower women, and that about 5 to 10
guys jumped in to say that women need to get over the gender issue and that
on a list dedicated to increasing female participation rates, the men cried
they were being discriminated against.)



-- 
twitter: purplepopple
blog: ozziesport.com
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/gendergap/attachments/20110317/14fe2a89/attachment-0001.htm