Why do proposals for a feminism stackexchange keep failing?

Question

Proposal: Feminism & Women Rights is another attempt in a long series to establish a feminism stackexchange site. I remember several similar proposals over the past years. I also remember some which collected quite a lot of good example questions. But AFAIK none of them ever graduated from Area51. I am unsure if any even got into the commitment phase (feel free to correct me when I am wrong about that).

Why did the previous attempts fail and what can be done different this time to help this proposal succeed?

Answer 1

I think a lot of the really interesting questions about feminism lend themselves better to a discuss-and-debate model with a lot of back and forth than to the straight Q&A format of SE. A Q&A would prioritize either (A) simple reference-checking or (B) "education" in one particular subtype of feminism.

A is less interesting, IMO--if I were an expert in the history of feminism, for instance, I'd be pretty unmotivated to spend my time looking things up for other people rather than doing my own research (especially including the creative work of drawing new conclusions).

B seems to me redundant--if I just want to learn about a particular flavor of feminism I can go read some books--and more importantly would miss out on and/or paper over the interesting diversity of thought in the third wave.

But it would be hard for different schools of thought to coexist in an objective Q&A format, since there are no agreed-upon ways to determine whether the Suchandsuch Feminists or the Thusandso Feminists are right about a particular question, at least not without a debate.

Answer 2

First of all, scope of feminism could be too narrow to have its own Stack Exchange site. I wonder what would be asked on this site and I believe it could generate more politically-motivated, opinion-based questions and answers than other sites.

Secondly, why does SE need Feminism SE while it has Politics SE?

If anyone has a question about feminism, I think it should be asked on Politics Beta SE. It's better to make a meta post on Politics Beta SE and ask the community if proposed questions that have been asked on Area 51 could be on-topic there.

Sports SE proposal merged with other sports-related proposals such as football, running, soccer, water sports, scuba diving, etc. A few of them might have a chance of surviving on their own, but I don't see any issue merging them with Sports SE.

Answer 3

Why are there even people that want a special feminism stackexchange, feminism is a political movement and we have a politics board. We also have a board about workspaces and academia. If it is about laws we have a law board. And for the feminist problems with religions we have many religion boards. An extra side for feminism wouldn't bring anything new to the table just tons of confusion with, which question goes where, also if feminism gets its own board, every subculture wants one, could you imagine that disaster?

Answer 4

To me this Feminism SE should focus more to popular culture (such as films, books, movies, etc.) and everyday life (such as the use of internet and social media, media coverage of big events, etc.), in order to welcome Q&A about how people deal with feminism (or, on the other side, sexism) in everything they see and feel during their lives.

In this way feminism can be viewed not as a "pure theory" to study but as an interactive part of the world we're living in: this can encourage people to ask questions & find answers about something concrete that they face everyday.

Of course, this Feminism SE could became also a good place to start discussion about important women and women condition in history, and how feminism itself has changed during years.

About Politics SE, I see it accepts questions about feminism (https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/feminism), but it seems they are more "law-oriented".

Answer 5

This isn't really a reason that the proposals fail, per se, and some of the other answers I think really nail it, but it could also be the case that some of the other existing sites already provide a happy home for a certain subset of the questions here, so perhaps a lot of folks are already satisfied with the coverage of existing sites? For example, to name a few:

• Health exists for personal health issues.
• Workplace can be used for certain questions about women's rights in the workplace.
• Academia is similar but in an academic context.
• Politics can be used for concrete questions about government actions and politics.
• Law can be used for purely legal questions.
• All the various religious sites.
• Etc.

I mean, in theory, any questions about gender-specific issues in a particular topic should generally be welcome on the site dedicated to that topic provided one sticks to that site's posting guidelines.

So it could just be that there's a satisfying amount of coverage already for the questions that lend themselves well to the Q&A model, and thus a lot of people don't feel a driving need to support these proposals (not because they aren't worthy proposals, but because it doesn't necessarily represent a gap in the current sites)? Of course this doesn't cover the more discussion-oriented topics. Also this is more of a random guess than anything based on reality.

Answer 6

The most obvious reason is SE's gender dynamics. The vast majority of new Q&A site participants come from other SE sites, which are based in programmer culture and other interests associated with masculinity (see list of sites by age). The usernames associated with our current proposal skew towards male-sounding names, and the seeded content reads like male questions about feminism, or male perspectives on what is important/interesting about feminism. Other SE Q&A sites associated with feminized topics should be expected to perform similarly, as I believe they currently do.

As for what can be done, I'd start with acknowledging the culture of SE and why women might not want to participate. (Is rep-driven Q&A the best venue for attracting experts on feminism? But the most obvious solution is to ask actual experts whether they would be interested and why, and to use those results to fix the format. Simple in theory, but outreach is hard.