Dave Neary’s post got me thinking. There’s a huge amount of truth in the open letter he linked to has a lot of truth in it. I’ve been thinking about the people who dominate the LUG meets I’ve been to. All of the people who spring to mind are men. Now, partly, this is due to the simple numbers game – there have been more men than women at every LUG meet I’ve been to. However, I don’t think it’s just that – even when there are women present in reasonable numbers, they generally take a quieter role. A lot of what that letter goes on to say is about formalising processes in meetings that are designed to achieve something. I got to two kinds of LUG meet – serious ones with a proper speaker, and social events.
At the serious ones, the speaker has always been given the respect they deserve and have generally been allowed to conduct the meeting as they see fit, but there have been occasions when one person (invariably male) has decided that they need to say almost as much as the speaker. Sometimes it’s purely because that person is particularly interested, and therefore asks questions and allows the speaker time to answer. Sometimes it seems to be because they like the sound of their own voice. I’m not sure there’s a huge amount I can do to help that directly, given anything I might do is likely to be seen as either me being a whinging woman or being just as bad as the guy trying to take over. Hopefully if people take a look at that letter and think about things they might not be that person in future.
The social events are a different breed of animal. They seem to suffer more from one or two men dominating the discussion – perhaps because they can get away with it as they have no speaker to rein them in. These events I think maybe I can do something about. None of the people who spring to mind that dominate these gatherings (and I think you know who you are) do it on purpose, and I doubt they even realise they’re doing it half the time. They also do want to hear what others have to say, you just have to fight to get their attention first. I know none of them will be at all offended at me saying “Oi! STFU!” and therefore that’s what I’m going to do. So if you’re at a LUG meet and I say that to you, it’s probably because you’re winding me up by talking over people and not letting someone else get a word in edge-ways. Please take it as it’s intended – STFU and let someone else have a turn.
