Humanities have a lot to teach us sciency and engenineering types, specifically the concept of constructed reality. We do make our own reality through what we know and our experiences. That’s the reason why diversity is so great, everyone has a slightly different reality and differences are greater the more the experinces differ. What we are talking about here is societal reality and not scientific reality. I’m not going to dispute that gravity is acting on me, but I will dispute that our society is post-gender, because these are two different classes of fact.

What the humanities can also teach us about, is the way human interaction works, they can teach us what is needed to actually increase representation of women, or men, in certain professions, in politics and in the home sphere. We would do well to listen, because we sciency types may have the answer to why soap cleans the dirt of a childs face, but not to why it is usually women who do the face cleaning ;)

By the way, anecdata like having several women friends in the PP who are happy there, does not mean the PP is genderbalanced or friendly towards women, we sciency types have strict rules about statistics, too ;)

- while there is not a huge number of women in the Piratenpartei, a surprising number of those who are wield quite a lot of influence. Look at who e.g. the leaders of the state party organizations are.

- supplying the Binnen-I has been used, a lot, to pat uppity women on the head, hand them their knitting, give them some inconsequential quota post, and put them on ice in their playpen. It is an empty symbolism that does not come with giving women any actual influence, quite the opposite (a good way to keep them occupied with something that does not actually change anything real), and a lot of geek women who see that happening prefer getting actual power to empty symbolism that has come to resemble mockery more than anything else. I believe there is some dissonance between more humanities oriented (“consciousness determines being”) and more science&engineering oriented (“gravity does not stop if you don’t believe in it”) people involved. As a member of the latter, I’ll forgo having job descriptions tailored to my sex and rather have equal pay, an equal chance at interesting work and equal chances to advancement, kthx. According to the latest statistics, in my line of work (system administration) the female workers are better paid than the males, so that approach doesn’t seem to be hopeless either (see Heise for the statistics).

- re transparency: that party is seriously wacky about that. I hope for their sakes they’ll grow out of it.

The PP discusses and publishes everything in an online wiki which is pretty much generally accesible. Thus the group and its press release could be deleted and reinstated.

One of the members who replied put a link to Val Henson’s “HOWTO Encourage Women in Linux”. By reading it I discovered that just mentioning the problem I violated rule 3.9 of the HOWTO (weird… :-/ )

Generally speaking, I would avoid artifacts such as the Sweden’s policy on the matter (that makes 13% of the members of the party detain 50% of the decision-making power), but since the problem is practical and IMHO becoming more urgent every day, it can be a solution… I don’t know. Anyone has suggestions there?

Let’s not even talk about the rather open sexism in the other ‘official’ plaxes for the AG Männer, like the subforum.

Interesting, seeing as the homepage of the AG Männer is password-protected. How is that for transparency?