[WikiEN-l] Systemic bias wrt gender

Sat Nov 25 18:04:56 UTC 2006

charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com wrote:
> Stan Shebs wrote
>
>   
>> The 
>> hazard of asserting that women editors have something similarly 
>> distinctive to bring to WP, by virtue of gender alone, is that one is 
>> playing right into the stereotype of "women's topics" or "female 
>> viewpoints", and risks creating a sort of "pink collar" ghetto in WP 
>> that new female editors would be subtly (or not-so-subtly) steered towards.
>>     
>
> The argument is broken.
>
> Sure, creating the editorial equivalent of traditional newspapers' Women's Pages is not only a generation out of date and patronising, it is nothing anyone with WP experience would want anything to do with.
>
> But WP is a voluntary organisation, first and foremost. Discouraging women in any way is shooting ourselves in the feet, big time. Not just because slant in topic coverage will be harder to correct. But because women are (on average) better quality volunteers. Why else did we elect Angela and Anthere to the Board?
>   
I absolutely agree. I'm speaking purely to the systemic bias point, 
valiantly trying to stay on-topic for this thread. :-)

My gut feeling on this is that there is some systemic bias in topics of 
interest to women, but that it's subtle and going to be hard to write 
down as a project a la Africa coverage. As I mentioned earlier, our 
right person to write in depth about blowdryers is not the daily user 
who has only anecdotal unsourced comments to relate, but the nerd who 
collects books on the subject or the retired engineer who used to design 
them - but how do you advertise the interest without getting into a big 
fight about stereotypes? Nobody gets accused of any -ism for building up 
a list of Gabon-related topics.

Stan