The founders of Sawnet assumed that the discussion email list would be a
place for men and women to discuss issues pertaining to South
Asian women. As soon as Sawnet officially opened, back in 1992,
there was considerable debate about allowing men to participate.
Eventually a vote was taken among the subscribers, and the
majority was in favour of keeping Sawnet woman-only for the
present. At that time, a sizeable percentage of subscribers
thought that once Sawnet was established, it would become open
to men.
The membership grew considerably, and the vote on allowing
male subscribers was taken several more times in the succeeding
years. Each time, the vote was overwhelmingly in favour of
a woman-only group, with a smaller and smaller percentage
voting for the inclusion of men. Thus, Sawnet has remained
a group run by, for and about women.
We frequently get mail from men who want to subscribe. New
women subscribers also sometimes feel that
a woman-only group is discriminatory and exclusive, or are
interested in the reasons
for this policy. So here are some of the arguments that the
voters put forward in favour of the woman-only list.
- There are many more men than women with access to email,
and a list open to both genders would tend to become heavily
male. The women would tend to get deluged simply by numbers.
[The counter argument is that few men would be interested in
a group such as Sawnet. However, the number of interested men
in just the first few days was almost equal to the number of
women, so it is likely that an open group would be predominantly
male.]
- A list devoted to women's issues, with two obviously
defined groups of subscribers, tends to become a discussion of the
differences between those groups. So if there were lots of men on
Sawnet, discussions on male-female interactions and differences in
response or patterns of behaviour would predominate. In 1993,
a Sawnet discussion on abortion/female infanticide was crossposted
to soc.culture.indian (a South Asian newsgroup with an apparently
mostly male readership). The Sawnet discussions focused on
what pro-choice women felt about female infanticide, what were
the ethical boundaries between abortion as a right and abortion
because the fetus was female, and what the discussants themselves
would do in various situations. The s.c.i discussion focused on
whether men had the right to have a say in abortion decisions.
Most of the women were less interested in the latter sort of topics, as
they had many opportunities to get the male points of view on
such issues.
- Some women feel insecure posting in a mixed forum. Some
subscribers felt that there was a well-established network among
South Asian men, and that anything they posted was likely to
be passed on to their male colleagues, friends, relatives and
supervisors.
- Many women felt that Sawnet provided them a unique forum
of articulate women. The inclusion of men would change the nature
of Sawnet, and why change something that was/is working so well?
Several subscribers suggested that the interested men should start
a similar list that was open to both genders, and that they
would participate in such a list. This suggestion has been
forwarded to all the men who expressed an interest in Sawnet,
but none have been willing to put in the effort to start such
a list.
This page was originally written in 1997, before the appearance of
several South Asian websites devoted to community and conversation. Sawnet, as a
daily email digest with no snazzy technological features, and restricted only to
women, might seem like a dinosaur in these times. Yet it has a
steadily growing subscription list and a thriving discussion, so
presumably it has its place.
