[Seattle-editorial] women in indymedia - a proposal by the imc womens list: another topic for tuesday's meeting and in working groups

[Sheri Herndon]

hi everyone,

the imc womens list has been discussing this proposal for months and it is now moving out to the local imcs and to get support for this proposal.  i have brought this up a few meetings ago when it was more in draft mode.  now it's been finalized and individuals and some local imcs have expressed support.  i'd like to have this discussed on line and in our general meeting and in working group meetings.  i'm including radiox because they are a media collective and i'm sure they are not immune to gender imbalances either and because the issues discussed in this proposal are much broader than indymedia.  we all can learn from how to improve gender relations and power dynamics in the world of technology and independent media.

so please read and ponder and discuss in your respective circles.

the link for the imc womens list in general with this proposal:  http://docs.indymedia.org/view/Global/ImcWomyn

and the proposal:

Proposal for New-IMC Process

The imc-women-list exists since summer 2001 and consists of women active in indymedias in Latin America, North America, Europe, the Middle East and Australia. Since two years, we have discussed in many facets the depressing situation of patriarchal repression in society which unfortunately doesn't stop at the doorstep of leftist groups.

Many concrete situations came up, in which women felt discriminated against in their local group. In most cases we were able to support the women emotionally and to give advice. But we feel that this is not enough.

Women are a small minority within many indymedia groups, some groups only consist of men. This may be due to the fact that people perceive indymedia mainly as a website and don't realize how much work needs to be done concerning building political relationships, outreach, editorial work etc. Therefore indymedia attracts relatively more people who are interested in computing than people who are not. Accordingly, the underrepresention of women within indymedia reflects the underrepresentation of women in Information Technology related fields.

However, only some incidents in which women felt discriminated against within their groups were tech related. Several complained about being silenced in meetings, some had experienced open sexist behavior, many stated that there was a general atmosphere that made it hard for women to work within their indymedia group.

This means that gender discrimination is not only due to the fact that techies have an important role within indymedia and techies tend to be male. It is apparent, that non-tech as well as tech males discriminate against women.

Many of our male co-activists have taken an active stance against gender discrimination within indymedia. And we hope they will keep up this stance as we don't perceive our struggle as females versus males but as a general cause.

However, the discrimination by individual men and the patriarchal atmosphere in some groups has reached such a degree that we believe action needs to be taken.

Furthermore we believe that similar mechanisms that minimize women's involvement also work against the participation of ethnic and sexual minorities and maintain a homogeneous class structure.

We talked about different measures to change this situation. As a result of our discussions, we would like to propose that these issues be addressed during the process which new imcs undertake.

Proposal:

We propose that the following questions be incorporated in the application form:

A. How does the makeup of your collective reflect the diversity of the local community (e.g. in realtion to gender-, sexual-, spiritual-, and/or cultural-identity)?

B. If your group currently does not represent the diversity of the local community, particularly in relation to groups who are underrepresented in mainstream society and denied access to vehicles of expression, what steps will be taken to address this on an ongoing basis?

C. What steps will be taken to involve individuals in workfields new to them? What measures will be taken to overcome a gendered work division?