Dear Colleagues,
About reduced figures on female contributors:
I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again: females are
busy being mothers and caregivers. Demographic
factors may vary, but in-the-trenches scholarly research needs to be undertaken if an
explanation to low contribution figures is seriously sought.
Women (and people of color) are likely
to have fewer financial resources than men (i.e. innovative time on their hands at the
keyboard). For single parents, it is worse yet (females who do not have a partner
provisioning them); they just don’t have the time. Moreover,
who wants to fight online intellectual/deletion battles and noob learning curves when
there is: laundry to do, cooking and dishes, kids to take somewhere, diapers,
homework, animals, gardens, transportation, and paying basic bills? Daycare support in
the U.S. has
evaporated and single-parent households have increased.
How many hours in her productive lifetime does a female
spend changing diapers? Nursing (Some mothers do this for years)? Preparing food?
Cleaning up after children- and without
domestic help? Overseeing homework? Then, there’s more than one child, then 2,
then maybe more, maybe many more. In
some nations, women go directly from mothering to grandmothering. Modern teens
don’t leave home; they cannot find jobs, so raising children, and the distractions that
come with it, have extended out a
few more years.
About Sue Gardener and challenges to increase female
participation:
Sue has earnestly identified a problem, and
is taking pot-shots for being the proverbial messenger. On gender balance, she
is facing a task riddled with problems of a global scope. Organizational issues at
Wikimedia, it is
said, inhibit more meaningful change. It
may be a bigger problem than Sue can take on, especially if she’s encouraged to
accomplish increased gender balance, but is not given broad authority to do it.
If this is relatively accurate, Sue’s
mandate is only partial and superstructural “culture” change is unlikely.
Human Resources (HR) at Wikimedia, are a puzzling lot. The weirdest phone interview I’ve
had, occurred
with one of Wikimedia’s HR people. The person proceeded to tell me about what “rock
stars” other job candidates were, and what exotic lands they hail from. As a social
scientist, one senses a poorly
developed ego, plus narcissistic impulses, which of course, cannot be satisfied. Serious
scholarship skills, such as those (less faraway-eyed) who would dig in and get to the
bottom of the gender question, get dimensionless
play by youthful (?) Wikimedia-identified employees. If investigative scholarship has
little
dimension for HR staff, and foci are “cultural fit” and being a “rock star”, not
to mention volunteership (volunteers-hip), something is lost in the group’s mission.
Demi-monde-ism from the core, and its adherence, is worrisome.
Even job descriptions at Wikimedia have not historically targeted
the obvious need for academic research scholarship, outreach, and sufficient
demographic research to get at this gendered tip-of-the-iceberg, larger
question; and it’s significance is not just for the U.S., not just for societies, but for
humanity.
Look, Wikimedia is not alone in this debacle. The medical establishment is trying to
figure
out why females of ethnic groups make the (non-medical) decisions they do. I also find,
given that I am a registered
reviewer of federal grants, that California
is not in the vanguard of dedicated social understanding on anthropological phenomena,
though it
would seem like a likely place for awareness to be cultivated.
Sue is at risk for being out of touch, as a non-parent, and possibly alienated with the
stressful social discourse she finds herself in. But, Sue can see to
it that scholars, who fight the good fight, and have the desire, and ability (as
gender specialists, who’ve earned social science research cred) to help her
struggle for infrastructural change, are invited, engaged, and paid to do so. Sue may
have opened Pandora’s Box, but so
far, she has faced this dilemma with courage and transparency. This is not dysfunctional;
it is social frontier.
About use of terms to describe southerly nations:
One term used among analysts is: “emerging economies.” This tends to enjoy more use today
than the
term it replaced- now fallen from vogue- “third world countries.” Because of global
impoverishment (by this
term, I mean natural resource exhaustion), we are not referring solely to the
tropics these days, and while the U.S. and other nations once thought of
themselves as the “first world” vanguard, it seems obvious that the “second
world” tier is repopulating, and open for reinterpretation, as well. The term “global
south,” while geographically
comprehensible, has geo-political problems, but it may depend on the argument
or perspective you want to present.
About falling literacy among youth:
I concur, as a university lecturer; I have students who use “Texteze”
in academic assignments. I find females are
more likely to submit it. Young males
are so busy in the gaming space, they are bored with focus in the academy; this
includes sciences. Research indicates (high-tech
countries’) boys are socializing better because of hoard/war games and the
strategies necessary for victories there.
Back to teen girls for a moment, they are also likely to draw hearts and
cute figures on academic assignments. I receive
emotive drawings on roughly 30% of girl’s papers, and 0% of boys. This in itself is
worthy of study.
One reason I’ve heard, from local employers, for firing/not
hiring youth, is compulsive texting on the job. Again, new studies indicate that youth
with
mobile devices become stressed if out of contact with peers for more than about
45 minutes. Colleges have the
responsibility, along with high schools of graduating job-ready youth, and they
are somehow losing the battle on this. Gender
data on this would also be useful. Maybe
someone on this list is looking at this, or knows scholars looking at gender in texting?
KS Rolph- Anthropologist
Palo Alto,
California