Gender ratios in the anarchist movement

Hi

But john, this just exposes an internal contradiction in Lazy Riser personally. It does nothing to address the interests of the working class who would much rather be able to afford and define their child care rather than suffer a rationed “free” service run by the government. Trouble is capitalism offers the worst of both worlds, whilst anarchism only offers the worst of one. Like I say, Women and many men have enough common sense to see through this naive and quasi-religious obsession with "child care" as if it's anymore of a right than a muff dive from Mr Depp.

Love

LR

That's probably a better example for the purposes of this discussion.

All female anarchist meeting - I'll bet money it was specifically something to do with women, or possibly women-only. I think I know from posts on here that you've been to meetings like that, have you been to an all-women anarchist meeting where the subject wasn't woman/feminist related - i.e. simply where no blokes happened to turn up?

All male anarchist meeting - I'll bet money it wasn't something specifically to do with men, but no women turned up to it.

If a group of women meet specifically to talk about issues important to women, then I think you'll see a different dynamic to a group of (people who happen to be all) men turning up to talk about a general (or geeky) subject. If you had a men's health meeting, which was all-men, then I think you'd see a different dynamic (and demographic) to a meeting about Hungary '56 which was also only populated by men, or whatever.

In other words, yes, I think the group dynamics at a meeting about women's issues, or men's issues, (or black issues, or disability issues) will be different than if people who might happen to be all members of those groups turn up to a meeting about something else.

It's about the nature and purpose of groups and meetings, not necessarily which gender (or any other social grouping) attends them.

Hi

I’ve been chatting to her indoors. If you look at anarchist and left communist ideology and the logical hoops it has to jump through only to fail to demonstrate itself as useful, only people with a certain internal perspective are going to really get into it. A psychological predisposition that is associated with predominantly, though not exclusively, male genetics. I mean like Terry Pratchet or something (who I haven't read).

Love

LR

that's good enough for me.

I'd be more interested to know how you plan to fund Basic Income, though, but maybe that's for another thread...

you swore on an anarchist board - watch out or you'll get banned!

Hi

Too right, so it should be brought up to pressure a derail into the anarchist comfort zone where we can talk about who-said-this-or-that rather than look into gender ratios. This is the quintessentially male anarchist outlook that accounts for the very problem this thread addresses.

Love

LR

hey should we open a thread about gender ratios in anarchist groups and what could be done about it?

Hi

If it did something about it, it would cease to be the Anarchist Movement. At the moment it's a way for people to cope with the world, not for people to meet their objectives.

Love

LR

This is an important topic, and yes gender composition is a problem, at least from my experience in the midwestern US. One thing my local group has done is start offering childcare at meetings and events. It's a small step and we've just started so we've not seen much result yet. I need to read the whole thread in its entirety before I respond further.

Personally, childcare would greatly assist my ability to go to political meetings, etc.

I don't think it's necessarily helpful to see this as a gender issue.

i'm gonna toss this probably overly simple thingie into the discussion, since nobody's precisely mentioned it.

it's been pointed out that, not only for Anarcho groups, but lots of political, ideological groups (or parties), the ratio of men to women tends to be poor. i might suggest, perhaps, a reason for this is due to the taught gender role of women to be cooperative and supportive, rather than combative and divisive.

i recall hearing, when i was in school, about some ethical hierarchy, where there was a sort of hierarchy of more-and-more ethical ways of thinking/acting. women tended to score lower on this, since the ones tested were reluctant to make hard decisions. the fellow who made this standard used this to suggest that women, in general, were less ethically advanced than men, in general. however, later, supporters of the concept of Care Ethics (or however that concept went), who had a particular feminist-inclination, suggested it had more to do with the inclination (natured or nurtured) to be more cooperative and supportive (etc). so, when the women were asked to answer these ethical dilemmas, instead of making a hard answer or making a sort of "lesser of two evils" decision, they would try to figure out a third option which would involve compromises or whatnot.

and i think that, perhaps, this might be one reason you may see less active participation in specific *ideological* groups (as opposed to groups based simply off of general issues). the whole "supportive/uniting" thing would incline many women to be wary of burning a bridge, and would prefer, instead, to try to unite the conflicting trends (or to stay out of it altogether).

(i was also thinking of how the whole "cooperative/supportive" thing may've risen long long ago, though that's probably not too relevant to the conversation at hand)

anyway, so, yeah. now that i'm done saying it, feel free to slaughter my theory )

Interesting post.I think there is something in what you say. I begining to think its harder from women to join revolutionary groups than it is for men - they have to fight against their own gender roles and they have learn to debate and discuss in a way they aren't immediately comfortable with. And the fewer women in the group, the harder it is for any new women. It's lonely. That's why I think womens only groups can be useful.

Hi. It's an interesting discussion. I've been at or read others like this and usually similar remarks are made. I do believe that when people become aware of the problems and take steps to really deal with them, things can get better, but as somebody said, there's also sometimes the case of coincidence.

In places I lived before moving to Poland, there was a better gender ratio, so I have some insight into what works better. Macho posturing alienates women, including intellectual posturing. Some authoritarian males are quite threatened by females who might have a different point of view and thus try to be dismissive and discourage them. For some people it is more important to be the authority or to be right that to hear people out. Sometimes they're right, sometimes wrong, but you should know that your role is to sit and listen to how smart they are and make them feel important. But I think somebody might have already said this.

One thing I started to see hear is that less general groups which focus on single issues tend to be more or less attractive to men or women. Maybe a coincidence. But here we have a majority of women in things like media work - but the majority of writers are men. Women just seem to do everything to keep things running.

Anarcho-syndalicalists have the worst gender ratio which is due to their strategy of concentrating on already unionized shop stewards from former state-run industries. Some years ago, when there was an alterglobalist action, these types suggested that feminists shouldn't organize a pink silver block because it will alienate the coal miners and other workers who they invited. It created a lot of alienation, because those people already argued a lot that all of those things are not really so important - the main thing is the working class revolution. Although I suppose that changing social relations and overthrowing capitalism is the most important thing for me, I don't want to be so dismissive of other people's issues - I think it's a better strategy to both increase people's class awareness and work on the issue of homofobia and conservatism among the working class.

If you look through the publications and look at the actions, you see very much that women are in the background, if not just decoration. (People from Anarchist Black Cross were recently sending around pornographic pictures as joke advertisements of ABC. Very offensive.) In the anarcho-syndicalist papers, all the people were hardhat factories workers with clenched fists and men were the heros of everything. We started to make a zine for women workers then. It was the first separatist thing I've ever been involved with but if you couldn't get integration, at least you could point out the problem. At first people sort of even laughed at it. Then at least there was some idea that there was a problem. So the men, at their conferences dominated by men, found some men who could talk about the problems of women on the labour market. Why couldn't they find women? Because they organize themselves in male cliques and never invited the general public to participate - it's always experts and people in their clique being presenters. So they don't find women - even if they are there because they are locked in a ghetto. Not that they don't let some women in, but it's slim.

Maybe another issue is that some women are more interested in the collective experience, therefore don't appear in the public foreground as much as men. In this place, the media and so forth always appoint "leaders" of the group - and it's always whatever man puts himself on center stage the most. It's very hard to get women to talk at demos for example. Somebody refered to this as shyness. But even in the cases where this isn't so, men sometimes become defacto leaders of things. For example, I know one group where some women do 90% of the work, but where the people from other cities tend to talk about how the men organize things. It's as if this work is invisible. Some American women were telling me once they had similar problems.

Well, all of these things discourage people. I'm sure it's different for different people, but if I were to guess, I would think that the problem is not so much along the lines of issues important for women or not, but group dynamics and insensivity to the issues.

This is a good discussion, Lone Wolf and I agreed to discuss this at the pub a few weeks ago so I guess I'll try and throw my two cents in before going out for the day.

I think the first question you should ask yourself is what kind of anarchist group are you trying to get better gender rations for. Obviously if it's a syndicalist group the answer will likely be different than if it is a more theory oriented group. My experience is largely with the Edmonton IWW and I have to admit our small reading group doesn't have anywhere near the decent gender ratio that our branch's active membership has.

What worked for us partly is moving from theory talk and recruiting politicos to trying to build a real workplace presence, what also helped was targetting women dominated industries. In a lot of ways this not only helped break the cycle of needing more to get women involved, but also brought in a lot of people who otherwise wouldn't have much to do with us. We have also had a pretty good track record of radicalising people who came right off the shop floor from the struggle.

Also I think something helped a lot is when a few of us (some women some men) decided to make a real effort to get women to step up to positions of responsibility. We generally avoid having any sort of affirmative action, or mandated ratios for officials positions in the branch, like committee chairs and delegates, but instead try and encourage people who may not be as assertive to step up and take positions. This has generally worked fairly well, and also shows to new women showing up that we take them seriously helping to build confidence and leadership.

Finally something that helped a lot was setting up an official policy on harassment. The discussion for this was very heated, and was drawn out for three meetings and in some ways was quite divisive. Having said that it allowed a lot of shit to be aired that was not being dealt with properly and it was important to have the discussion. In the end we are a lot stronger having this policy and I think the discussion we had on the issue in and around meetings did a lot for the overall political education of the branch, as well as opening the eyes of a few of us as to how much work on these issues really needs to be done.

I also just wanna apologise to Lone Wolf because I think we were going to discuss this at the Foundry and I don't think we ever got around to it.

EW

Great!! A really positive post!! No need to apologise tho I appreciate it. One of the ironies of life is that people who offer apologies generally don't need to and those who should apologise rarely do

I think all these ideas sound not only good but practically effective - a sure way to encourage more femme participation! Targetting femme dominated industries, women in positions of influence.. all good stuff. Obv. the harrassment policy debate got heated cos it trod too close to home and caused people to look at their own behaviour as opposed to just postulate or look at it in the abstract. Challenging obstructive behaviour and then working it through is difficult, and in fact the hardest part of the process but HAS to be done for us to make any real progress. Resistance brings growth.

Cos for me the biggest challenge is to defeat the "enemy within"..by which I mean negativity and hostility both within ourselves AND within our group. If we can do this and truly then be united I consider us to be unstoppable.

I like this quote from Winston:

"The opposition is in front of you. The enemy is behind you."

So once the shit in our own ranks is dealt with we can move forward and defeat the opposition. An injury to one and all that!!

Btw I feel really positive about what you guys are doing and quite inspired by it all tbh. Will post again later as should be working

Love

LW XX

hey John, it's not necessarily helpful. Here's how it might be: What can we do to have more women members and women in active/leadership roles? One obstacle is childcare, as it's women who do most childcare and women who are more likely than men to miss events because of childcare responsibilities, at least in our experience in our town. So, we start offering childcare at/around meetings and events.

This also makes it easier for the men in the group who have kids, so it doesn't just effect women. On the other hand, those men with kids who come out more often now, they still came out before. Their female partners pretty much never did. If the man was out without the kids, the kids were probably home with the woman. If the branch will take care of the kids during the meeting then both people can be involved if they want, or if the woman doesn't want to be part of the group at least the man's participation isn't upping the amount of childcare done by the woman. Like I said, though, this is a new thing for us and we'll see if it has results.

In my experience with the IWW, branches that organize more in workplaces start to take on the composition of the worker in those shops/industries. That's another way to address gender make up (or racial/ethnic make up), target an industry (or neighborhood or issue) that has a better composition than the group. And make a sustained effort to develop leadership out of relationships built that way. My sense is that this part of why some white anarchists in the US have gotten involved in CopWatch and prison work. Personally I'd be all for our group picking a target or targets based on the gender make up of the shop/industry. We might discover then that there are other obstacles to women participating in the union (harrassment maybe, or some meeting dynamics like men talking too much, I'm not sure), which we would then need to address.

I've been a few anarchist groups, all were majority male, apart from one bookshop where there was a 50/50 ratio, and looking back on it one of the failures we did was to not really talk about and organise around issues that affected women. We didn't really discuss stuff like the politics of housework, ie. the centrality of domestic work to the reproduction of capitalism as a whole, let alone think how to oppose it. So one lesson i learnt is that trying to get more female participation in workplace stuff is really difficult cos it still tends to be a male preserve. I think organising against capitalism without addressing unpaid domestic labour is pretty silly. Even then I think sometimes i get carried away with using class to explain everything, when it doesn't. Its limited.

We also didn't talk about the patriarchical family and how central it is the maintainence of authority. We paid lip-service to anarcha-feminism but no real substance, even though a lot of the groups i was in had a lot of anarcha-feminists.

I am banned from this thread and can't post on it. Admins are being generous and assuming I'd forgotten, as opposed to me assuming they had.

maybe so, but I still think this is about managing the various tasks that we need to do, on the limited resources we have - which isn't necessarily a gender issue.

Personally, there is a relatively even balance of childcare between me and my wife. I'm guessing that a lot of people who call themselves 'anarchist' also wouldn't subscribe to traditional gender roles when it comes to childcare. I may be wrong on that, but I would still prefer to talk about childcare as a resource issue than a gender issue, in part because using the gender definition seems to reproduce gender roles that I don't believe are helpful.

revol - why don't you post your opinions now, whilst the admins aren't looking - I'd be interested to know what you think on this thread even if Jack isn't

john what about single parents, the overwhelming number of whom are women. Recognising gendered roles may carry problems of reproduction, but at least you can address issues because they are visible. Not using gender also creates problems of reproduction, by rendering it a "resource issue" we miss the specfic and signifcant gendered relations of the "issue" and they become submerged in a process of 'objective' resource management.

John I don't understand. How does saying "this is a gender issue" reproduces gender roles?

I agree that childcare is a resource issue, and that not every single instance of an issue with childcare is a gender issue. It's an issue for any working class parent who wants to participate in some group. So, it's not like everytime our branch supplies childcare we're doing something which addresses gender. But in at least some cases this resource issue is a gender issue. That's how the childcare thing came up, as one small thing we could implement right away that would lessen one barrier to some women participating in our group.

obviously I've got no problem with providing assistance to single parents or with providing childcare in meetings.

I don't think I've got anything else to add, to be honest. I think this is an issue about the burden of child-rearing not being placed solely on the shoulders of the individual parent(s), but rather viewed as a social (i.e. extra-family) responsibility.

If you want that to be about women's rights, then go ahead. But it affects me as well, I see no benefit in restricting it's scope to women, and I think it could reinforce certain unhelpful gender roles if viewed in that way.

TBH, while I agree that childcare is important, I'm not sure if the lack of childcare is the key problem. My experience may be atypical, but most people I know got involved with politics in their late teens/early twenties before they had children - and still it is mostly young men who are interested in joining anarchist groups rather than young women.

(I think i've expressed that badly, but I hope you can get the jist)

but once you have children it becomes increasingly difficult to do anything, other than look after them.

If childcare facilities were available, then perhaps this predominance of pre-parents in political circles might change.

admin edit - still banned, but talking to others to see about unbanning

I'm just addressing some points raised here, I'm sorry I don't pick individual posts and points. Not much time and all, but very interesting debate.

Women aren't seemingly as interested because of social conditioning would be on what I agree the most with previously raised points. If we see this conditioning broken, the trend will change (I'm sure you're all thinking No shit, Sherlock). I don't think it's necessary to target women's issues to attract women, it's more a question if a group is offering enough empowerment to all members equally. Also targeting women's issues to attract more female participants, throws yet again into the question this social conditioning, women's horizon of interests has been socially accepted only when narrowed down to interests seemed 'fitting' for them. I think we all can universally agree that untill we are all free, none of us are free. As long as the group operates from that understanding, it won't make anybody feel excluded.

Within my own experience, the ratio has been more of male to female ratio. In my own experience, I'd say sometimes it's harder for a women to be 'heard' in predominantly male enviroment. I've experienced a psychology dynamic in such enviroment, that women would have to establish their position of assertivity and of being to be able to be as logical and knowlegable while the rite of passage would be somewhat shorter for male incomers. Often you'd see women to express a point and it would be ignored, untill a male would repeat exactly the same point and suddently then the point would 'exist' and be discussed. Of course in female dominated enviroment we'd see a different dynamic as was pointed out. As long as sinking into societal prejudices and learnt social behaviour based on such, is kept in check, it should be done away with.

Jess (from first page)

As well as the enjoyment thing, is that they've been conditioned that to be able to use violence is something very wrong for them to do. My martial arts teacher used to throw in regularly that when women feel their children/loved ones are in danger, they can connect to such power that they're as deadly, if not more, than their male counterparts. In societal trends though, they've been taught to depend on males for this protection rather than employing it themselves. I think when it is recognised that the conditions of revolution will not guarantee non violent solution more than likely, it discourages women from taking part is down to this. So to encourage women to see the road to revolution as something they could get involved in - is to get rid of social conditioning that they could not participate in what they were traditionally taught to depend on men.

Sovietpop

But that only further attests to the childcare as a key problem because people with kids become less able to be politically active and therefore you see them less represented within the movements. I'm in that situation myself. I've been more politically active and more involved with direct action before I had a child and especially before I became a single parent.

Yip, fair points.

I think an anarchist group that exists as an anarchist group will often have a male bias. However campaigns that anarchists are involved in are often different. For example HSG is probably 2/3 male in the core, but campaigns which it is involved with can be 50/50 for example protesting against the concrete factory or the closure of a local pub. One of the problems anarchist groups face is that they are not involved in local struggle. It seems to be that getting involved as anarchiosts in local struggles is the way forward, rather than organising as anarchists and then wondering why there are not as many women.

In terms of childcare young women are more likely to be looking after younger brothers/sisters than young men. This shouldn't be overlooked either.

The other thing is that many meetings during the day are better attended by women, but most anarchists meet in the evening. There are lots of reasons for this.

Hmmm well I've only just managed to read through this.

It's weird, no one I think has mentioned the main reason I think there aren't many women in anarchist groups. As others have pointed out, it's not just anarchist groups, it's pretty much all political groups apart from single issue women-related ones. I think this is simply because we are conditioned to see politics as a men's thing, like science or boxing. This is then reflected in every political group.

I don't think there's much worth doing about it - although I agree with Jess's suggestions, but they're pretty basic common sense - and in terms of actual numbers I don't think it's that relevant since we're so small. And a silly example but I mean if one say all-female textile factory was organised into some libertarian way that would pretty much balance out the numbers.

I have a few individual points of people's I want to address but I'm outta here now.

Hmm I'm not sure about this being a gender thing. I think if people are like that they're just as likely to be threatened by anyone who disagrees with them. Though a woman may be more likely to think "it's because I'm a woman" when in fact it's not. For example a few of us knew one female anarchist who was convinced that some people didn't like her because they couldn't stand powerful women, when in fact it was because she was an obnoxious arse.

environmental and animal groups have about 50/50, if not more female partticipants, at least here in manchester immigration groups have more females than males, the local radical social centre activist groups have more women than men etc.

So i would fundamentally disagree that this problem cust across all political activity apart from womens issues. It is a specifically revolutionary class politics based group problem i think.

true, but probably just the fact that we would move from "talking to walking" could already address the balance.

But internal politics, behaviours and organising can address this. In Manchester there are few more woman now, so lets see if that will break the barriers...