For the benefits of posterity, I preserve this toot:
I’ve been thinking a lot about what a friend pointed out - that mixed gendered spaces often quickly become male-exclusive because men tend to have much higher tolerance for arsehole behaviour than women, so it only takes one dodgy person to destroy a community as all the women basically leave. Once such a community has heavy male bias it can hardly recover, and its lack of representation means it can hardly succeed in any social, cultural or technical aims. Rings true for the extraordinarily bad gender balance in free/open source software in the context of the Stallman report.
Yeah I basically agree and I’ll make explicit that the “arsehole behaviour” is misogeny and racism, and how it is expressed through off-colour jokes and irony.
Spending time in communities Alex has a prominent role in, I can see how he pulls this off. Very impressive. Much to learn.
The hackspace is kinda male-dominated in a way that most of the prominent people are men. I think this is partly a consquence of the male-dominatedness of FOSS/maker/hacker spaces anyway, but also definitely doesn’t help that there are occasional unpleasant men. What could you do about that? pastagang are working on this, frontrunners are working on this
- feminise the space a bit, like what pastagang have done by being pink+loveheart themed recently. flower crowns?
- women+ only events, maybe a women+ only show+tell? stitch+bitch? (like NFR’s FLINTA+ runs)
- posters in the studio/comfy area that are like “BE AWARE OF HOW OTHERS, EVEN PASSERS-BY, MIGHT INTERPRET YOUR WORDS AND HOW THIS MIGHT MAKE THEM FEEL ABOUT THE SPACE/THE PEOPLE WHO ARE WELCOME HERE”
- reduce my tolerance for arseholes and increase my tolerance for confrontation