Certainly, lack of time goes some way toward explaining the absence of women here and other discussion forums like this one. But lack of time must affect the religious as well, and getting actively involved in the affairs of one's church, etc. surely takes more time than taking part in an online forum.
Or could it be that religious women actually do have more time than secular women, say, because the former are less into wage labor than the latter?
On 12/4/06, Marvin Gandall <marvgandall at videotron.ca> wrote:
> The issue of women's participation has been around for as long as I've been
> on the left. Interestingly, I found a higher percentage of women ready to
> participate in the NDP and in the unions than in the far left groups. We've
> had some thoughts on why this might be so, but would be interested in your
> own, informed as they are by your own experience.
That is definitely the case here in the USA: the further left you go, the fewer women you find. Women are probably more realistic and pragmatic than men on the average, so they don't get interested in things that are very unlikely to have any practical results.
Also, when left-wing women take part in feminist forums, which tend to be dominated by white liberal women of the upper strata of the working class and petty producers, they encounter problems rooted in class contradiction among women and thus also of feminist organizations, but by now most left-wing women must have decided that tackling class, race, and other contradictions among women is more worthwhile than tackling gender, race, and other contradictions among leftists, let alone far leftists.
On 12/4/06, Chuck <chuck at mutualaid.org> wrote:
> I think the main reason behind this gender ratio has more to do with the
> fact that men are actively encouraged to be interested in politics and
> women are not.
Despite the lack of encouragement, I think women are interested in politics, lack of encouragement itself having a politicizing effect. It seems that women are either not interested in airing their views as often as men do or don't have time to do so or both.
> I also think that the other main reason has to do with
> the tone of political lists. Men are more into confrontational styles of
> argument, which are the rule on most political e-mail lists and
> discussion boards.
Flames certainly don't help.
> One thing I'm curious about. Why is that women don't post as much, but
> they are better about donating money? Do women tend to post anonymously
> more or are they mostly reading arguments and discussions and not
> participating?
Are women really donating more money to left-wing orgs, causes, etc. than men? If true, that's very interesting, but I haven't seen anything that confirms that. Is that coming from your Infoshop experience? -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>