[pp.int.general] Women Pirates project

[Joonas Mäkinen]

What he said. O_o

2010/5/3, Eric Priezkalns <eric.priezkalns at pirateparty.org.uk>:
> I feel this is a mistaken way to deal with a symptom, not a root cause.
>
> Yes, there are too few women in the pirate movement.  There are also
> too few older people, too few poor, too few ethnic minorities.
>
> These people are not in the pirate movement not because of a failure
> to 'mainstream' or 'empower' or any other jargon words that might be
> spoken by a New York Professor of Sociology.  They are not in the
> pirate movement because the pirate movement makes too little effort to
> appeal to them.  In short, we do not try to explain our policies in
> ways that appeal beyond a audience that is predominantly young, male,
> white and reasonably privileged.
>
> The worst thing we could take is to take women, or any other group,
> and place them in a 'special interest' faction.  Instead of modifying
> the policy message to make it more appealing to a wider audience, they
> will just be pushed into creating 'special interest' policies.  I
> dislike the idea of that intrinsically, but more importantly, that
> approach never seems to work in politics.  Voters can see through it
> and it does not appeal to them.  In short, if you cannot come up with
> a political philosophy with a core message that is appealing to women
> or any other subset of society, you cannot address that by creating
> specialist policies around the edges.  People can innately see the
> special interest policies do not fit with the philosophy and so become
> sceptical about them, and rightly so.
>
> If we want more women etc in the movement, the right place to begin is
> not by creating a ghetto for them.  The right place is to look at
> ourselves and ask what is in our behaviour that is a barrier to
> inclusion.  It is not hard for me to see examples of behaviour that
> leads to exclusion from the pirate movement.
>
> When you talk to fellow pirates, it is extraordinary how often the
> conversation ends up in narrow techno-jargon.  Well, there is nothing
> wrong with that in itself.  Young white men from a certain kind of
> background like talking about that kind of thing.  Problem is, it
> probably does not appeal to others so much.  If you do not understand
> what somebody is talking about, chances are you will lost interest in
> listening to that person.  Similarly, pirates often explain their
> motives using analogies that once again draw on narrow knowledge that
> not everyone would appreciate or understand.  I'm a man, and I can
> hold my own in debates where phrases from formal logic crop up, or
> where people talk about an aspect of Microsoft's business model, or
> concerning the merits of STV versus AV, or where someone uses internet
> slang.  But not everybody will want to participate in such a
> conversation.  Some will just run from it as fast as they can.
>
> The real challenge here is to recognize that people like to be around
> and to form communities with other people with a similar outlook.
> There is nothing wrong with, say, young people wanting to canvass the
> support of other young people, and being proud when they win their
> support.  But this is the kind of behaviour that can so easily limit
> the horizons of who the party talks to and appeals to.  So if we want
> to help the party to appeal to and engage more women supporters, we
> should not push them into a special faction where they disconnect from
> the rest of the party, or are given enhanced 'visibility' because of
> their gender instead of merit.  If we want to help the party to appeal
> and engage more women, and any other group in society we fail to
> reach, then we should sit back and think for a while about our own
> behaviour, and how aspects of it might exclude others.  We should
> listen to the concerns of people who are not like us, and think about
> what we say that is of relevance to those concerns.  If we can all
> learn to modify our language when appropriate, think more of others,
> put ourselves in their shoes, and engage with their concerns in terms
> they relate to, then we really will reach out to more people and help
> both them and us.  That needs every pirate to be more open to engaging
> the support of every person on this planet, whatever their gender,
> race, class or whatever.  I would rather see every pirate moderating
> their own behaviour and engaging more widely, than the creation of a
> special interest faction with the movement.
>
> Best regards,
>
> Eric
>
>>
>> From: "Bogomil \"Bogo\" Shopov" <bogo at piratskapartia.bg>
>> Date: 2 May 2010 12:26:34 BST
>> To: Pirate Parties International -- General Talk
>> <pp.international.general at lists.pirateweb.net
>> >
>> Subject: [pp.int.general] Women Pirates project
>> Reply-To: Pirate Parties International -- General Talk
>> <pp.international.general at lists.pirateweb.net
>> >
>>
>>
>> Hey again,
>> Here is some ideas and tasks for a project called WOPI. I am looking
>> forward to see you participating.
>> http://int.piratenpartei.de/User:Bogomil/Projects/WOPI
>
>


-- 
Joonas "JoonasD6" Mäkinen
Varapuheenjohtaja, viceordförande
Piraattinuoret – Piratungdom

Department of Mathematics and Statistics
Faculty of Science
University of Helsinki

gsm +358 40 700 5190