>Yoshie is correct, but she does not go far enough. Too few of all sorts
>of catergories post: too few from the non-anglo saxon world -- we have
>people from all over the world -- too few of the lurkers post.
>
>In the past, I have declared a couple of days when none of us regulars are
>permitted to post to encourage new contributors. It did not work very
>well.
I've thought about the absence of other categories, too. I'm so cost-effective, being female, bisexual, & decidedly non-Anglo, a non-native speaker of English, and, get this, a Marxist -- buy one, get four free in the world of diversity marketing; in the right-wing nightmare, people like me are so inundated with cushy job offers from academia & corporations (not to mention left-wing orgs) that poor Anglo men can't put a foot in the door! But the reality is that women & non-whites are often marginal in left-wing institutions, and academia & corps have little use for us at higher-pay levels (e.g., full profs are mostly graying white men, while younger part-timers are often female). And somehow many left-wing institutions such as e-lists, journals, etc. have been left behind academia & corps in terms of diversity. How come???
As for PEN-L, one thing that the moderator can do is e-mail the "silent majority" offlist individually, encouraging them to post (which I believe Michael has sometimes done already, however). This is a _lot_ of work, though, and I hate to add to Michael's already phenomenal workload. Maybe all regular posters should write offlist to "silent ones" who we know are here. Like, "hey, I know you've worked on this topic, and I'd very much like to hear this discussed on the list, could you please post when you have time?"
Regarding contributions from the non-Anglo world, Lou's Marxism list & Leninist-International excel LBO & PEN-L in racial, ethnic, national, & linguistic diversity. Perhaps from a quarter to a third (?) of all posts on Marxism & Leninist-International are (in part or whole) in Spanish, for instance. All leftists should be encouraged to become at least bilingual, I think. And those of us who can read more than one language should help translate (as folks have done on Marxism & Leninist-Inernational).
On the other hand, LBO & PEN-L excel Marxism & Leninist-International in women's participation, though both got a long way to go to even approximate gender parity (an illusion of gender parity on LBO, for instance, is largely due to frequent overposting of Kelley & especially yours truly).
Advertizing may help. Posting info about the list to the lists where lots of women & non-Anglos hang around.
Back to everyday-life politics of gender -- do men reply to men's posts more often than they reply to women's posts? Those who get no or few replies tend to stop posting (which is likely to have effects on "silent ones" who see this happen also); the same should be considered in the real-world meetings. (In your calculation, please except me -- I always get a whole bunch of replies to most posts on all the lists to which I post.) And when men reply to women's posts, what are attitudes of men in doing so? Do some men tend to be patronizing to women, lecturing us as if we were simpletons? Do some men tend to get irked by, and become hostile to, aggressive intellectual women more often than in response to aggressive intellectual men?
Lastly, I went to a Solidarity Youth conference at OSU the other day, and I saw something like gender parity in participation (if not quite in leadership & in _Against the Current_). (Solidarity should work on racial diversity, however.) I might join Solidarity if they changed their tenor on anti-imperialist issues.
Yoshie