systematically saying what others had preferred was unsaid

It's just part of a list of blogs, each characterised differently, but this particular item on the list is about us: "Misbehaving systematically saying what others had preferred was unsaid".

See, that's it, isn't it. All these posts about yet another conference with hardly any women speakers, they get tiring, tedious, even for those of us who write them. Sometimes I doubt their efficacy. A week or two ago I ranted at Reboot 7 for having 24 male and 1 female speaker, and having the cheek to say that that was purely due to quality, there were no other reasons for the imbalance. Like hell. I don't think much good came of my rant. Maybe a few people saw the absurdity of it. Foe and Matt posted a list of women the organiser should ask. Maybe he'll actually think of asking women next time.

The week after I tried a different approach when I noticed a large newspaper's blog on games had 20 male and 1 female writer. I deleted my angry blog post, and emailed the blog's head author instead, turning on all my charm and asking whether he'd considered asking such and such a woman to participate. He wrote back happily and through further correspondence I was able to tell him about several women who'd be great on the blog, and I think two of them are actually going to be writing there.

The second approach, of course, is the traditional female way of getting things done. My grandmother was an expert lobbyist and campaigner, you know the kind, stay at home mother, as most were then, who was involved in dozens of societies and got really important things done for the environment, for women and for the disadvantaged. She taught me exactly how to do things the traditional way. Ask questions, don't make statements. Don't get angry. Be happy when they think it was their idea so long as they do what you want. Never admit you know how to filet a fish or you'll be preparing and cooking fish after every fishing trip.

There's obviously a time and a place for each technique. Maybe my behind the scenes tactics worked better in the short term, and perhaps they'll have as big an effect as the angry approach would have. But we so need to make the inequities visible. The conference organiser I mentioned above wrote that it hadn't even occurred to him that he'd only invited one woman -- isn't that amazing? But it's exhausting being angry, and I'm not sure how much it helps, either. I was starting to think that perhaps the second approach was the better.

Until I read that characterisation of Misbehaving. Yes, perhaps Misbehaving should be a place for "systematically saying what others had preferred was unsaid". None of us can systematically do that all the time all alone. Having a collective that can do that might be really important.