This page lists a number of best practices you can incorporate into your geek group to make it a safer space for women and other marginalised participants
Patterns
Anti-harassment
Adopt a Community anti-harassment policy for your spaces, and a Conference anti-harassment policy for your events.
Anti-patterns
We're young and fun and pretty!
Some geek groups that are notionally broadly aimed at women focus on portraying the participants as ideally feminine and non-threatening as possible, by eg emphasising youth, happiness and prettiness. (There may be reasons to emphasise youth if that is the group's target demographic, but some groups do this even if they aren't designed as a group for girls or young women.)
This will exclude women who are older, cranky and/or not conventionally pretty or feminine. It will also suppress feminist opinions and activism by or within the group, because feminist activism is pretty much the opposite of being perceived as fun and non-threatening.
We welcome men! We are so so so welcoming of men! Welcome!
Sometimes a group's communications go out of their way to state their group's welcomingness and embrace of men. Even groups that allow male participants shouldn't center them and their worries about not being welcomed, if they're designed to be for women. A neutral statement along the lines of "this group welcomes people of any gender identity as members" or "this group welcomes people of any gender identity, including men, as members" should suffice.
Supportive men are so amazing! Applause!
In groups that include men, men are often unduly rewarded for the most basic of supportive actions, such as stating their recognition of sexism, or their support for feminism. A common pattern in in-person feminist tech groups is that men receive rounds of applause for such statements, when no one is applauding women for anything.
It helps to specifically call out this pattern when you see it.
See also: Feminist cookie
Everyone who calls themselves a volunteer is one!
If the group volunteers are "anyone who regards themselves as a volunteer" you set yourself up for these situations:
- someone causes a lot of conflict or requires a lot of emotional support and care from other volunteers, without actually doing any work
- cookie licking, in which volunteers claim a portion of the project, fail to work on it, but either defend their territory or are ceded it, resulting in no work happening on that portion of the project by anyone
Your volunteer group needs to be a group of actively involved volunteers, people should be encouraged to review their commitment periodically, and it needs to be possible that people can be fired if they aren't doing work or are doing harmful work.
You're oppressing me (by asking me to behave)!
Feminist groups should center inclusiveness and intersectional concerns, but sometimes members use intersectional concerns as an excuse for poor behaviour. Groups may sometimes face the situation where someone is claiming that their destructive behaviour is a result of their oppression and need to discipline that person or ask them to leave regardless.
Documenting your procedures and behaviour standards at a time of low conflict can help with this. Ideally this process is led by people with intersectional oppressions but at the very least it should actively seek and incorporate their feedback.
I love to heal men!
In groups that allow men, some men may join for emotional support from women rather than to be part of the geek community. This arises from men being conditioned to believe women are required to support them emotionally. Women's matching conditioning to be supportive of and caring to men can make it difficult to exclude a man who is lonely or in difficulties and using the group as a source of emotional support, because women members may rally to continue supporting him.