The Occupy Movement's Woman Problem
Women may be the 51%, but the Occupy camps and General Assemblies look as gender-imbalanced as Congress
“I’m called ‘that white bitch who gets everything she wants’ at the GA’s,” says Elise Whitaker, 21, adopting a bit of a defiant posture. She’s been at Occupy LA since the second day of the encampment. A now former-assistant director for indie films, Whitaker is good looking in a vaguely familiar, probably-an-actor kind of way. She looks like just the type who moves to Los Angeles every day to “follow their dreams,” but she’s sleeping in a tent at City Hall. She tells me she has figured out what she wants to do with her life: activism. This is it for her. She loves this stuff.
It’s early November and helicopters are hovering over our heads as the Los Angeles Police Department arrests a guy who is thought to have attempted to light a woman’s hair on fire at the camp. He was kicked out and has been causing problems ever since. Nearly 20 police officers are gathered at the corner of the park. This interrupts my conversation with Whitaker and delays her next interview with a YouTube channel called Insight Out News.
During the very first week of the Occupation in LA I noticed that the gender breakdown in its General Assembly (GA) and various committee meetings was roughly the same as the within the U.S. Congress. In other words, about one-fifth of those who were participating in the (small d) democratic part of this Occupy encampment were women. It was the same with the people who slept in the camp.
This is pretty consistent throughout the movement in general.
Thus far I’ve visited eight Occupations in the U.S. and Canada, four on the West coast and four on the East: Toronto, New York City, Baltimore, DC, Los Angeles, San Francisco, the University of California at Berkeley and Oakland.
The only GA that had anywhere near gender parity was the largest one there’s been yet
<a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/11/the-occupy-movements-woman-problem/248831/tag:news.google.com,2005:cluster=http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/11/the-occupy-movements-woman-problem/248831/Tue, 22 Nov 2011 16:07:49 GMT”>The Occupy Movement's Woman Problem