[WikiEN-l] Systemic bias wrt gender

Sat Nov 25 17:38:35 UTC 2006

Puppy wrote:
> Women are emailing me telling me how intimidated they feel - they don't 
> want to post their concerns to this list because they also feel 
> intimidated here. That I would have never known had I not replied.
>   
Women feeling intimidated by public mailing lists, and complaining about 
it in private email, has been going on steadily since I first got on the 
net nearly 25 years ago. It's an interesting phenomenon for the 
sociologists - if you look at the subscriber list, you'll see that there 
are plenty of male lurkers, but of course they don't give their reasons 
for not speaking up. Once in a great while I've met one of these male 
lurkers in person, and a couple (almost shamefacedly) admitted to 
feeling intimidated by the risks of public posting. In any case, this is 
not unique to WP mailing lists, and as far as I know it's never been 
satisfactorily resolved for public lists - having a women-only or 
approved-members-only list is the usual tactic, but then it's not really 
a public list anymore. Any other ideas that have been tried?

Stan