Women engaging with all aspects and forums at the WSF is vital, but one of those discussions has to be of women's experience of being subjected to sexual predation and must be on an equal footing with the very many other dialogues that come out of the WSF.

Free choice of sexual activity has to be equal for all - or many individual women will continue to be overwhelmed, disempowered and unequal - not much social justice there...

The intention of my article was not to make any final judgement but to describe the aspirations of the World Social Forum, as an introduction to my participation in the forum in Nairobi. It raised questions which - in the spirit of intellectual enquiry - I have been exploring at the WSF and on my blog http://womenwsf.wordpress.com/ .

The FEMNET report, quoted in the article, formed part of WSF?s lengthy preparations for Nairobi and includes testimony from both participants and organisers. The fact that FEMNET ? a pan-African women?s advocacy group - was invited to carry out the study demonstrates two points:

1) the (male and female) organisers of this forum wished to address gender inequality

2) African feminists have been involved in the WSF process.

Fatma Alloo, a council member of the Africa Social Forum and a member of the organising committee says: ?We adopted a policy for 50.50 inclusion of men and women in the list of speakers, movements and attendance.?

Another member of the organising committee, Lebohang Pheko, a member of the Gender and Trade Network for Africa, told me that this has not quite been achieved in the panels of some of the big debates. However, the commitment to make women an integral part of the process has overcome the issue of ghettoisation identified by the WSF.

Many women here from different parts of the world call themselves feminists, many don?t. But women have been involved in all the debates. Feminists have worked together to identify common ground and the external factors which shape their lives: the global economy, militarism and fundamentalism. These are key themes of the forum affecting both women and men; but poverty, war and conservatism have a greater impact on women.

There has been plenty of evidence of this in the debates on violence against women ? a specific area which the organisers pledged to highlight at the forum ? and men have been involved in the discussions.

The Nairobi forum has a particular African dimension, which was deliberate on the part of the organisers. Neo-colonialism in Africa is contributing to an increase in poverty and conflict. The forum is a first step to developing a pan-African social movement in the face of this. Participants from other continents welcome the opportunity to develop south-south solidarity, with the vision of south-south trade - as an alternative to the EU Economic Partnership Agreements and the Free Trade Agreements.

The Nairobi forum has been successful in avoiding the colonisation of the forum by ideologies (and discourse) from the north, an aspect which has been criticised in previous years.

The organisers emphasise that the WSF is a process which is continually evolving. This year they have structured the forum with a final day for future planning on a number of key themes, where different groups and movements come together to agree on a shared agenda.

This is an example, not of separatism, infighting nor totalitarian tendencies, but of women and men speaking in their own voice and working together for a better world.

They may not succeed but, in the spirit of openDemocracy?s mission to provide a platform for marginalized voices and alternative viewpoints, I think the process itself is worth reporting.

You can read more at

http://womenwsf.wordpress.com/

I have witnessed little progress for women in fighting these issues in the last three decades because we seem to have absorbed the ideology of victimhood into feminist identity and praxis. Little wonder that men are not interested in attending feminist workshops at forums like the WSF. There are only so many years that you can listen to a discourse of woes. As women we need to break out of this form of internal colonisation and empower ourselves in positive practice that changes the world around us. This means abandoning our self created ghettos where we bemoan our fate and create narratives of victimhood and elite discourses that only initiates with PhDs can understand. Rather we should be engaged in the mainstream to bring our voices to bear on the policies and practices that marginalise us, to fight for positions of leadership, to influence events at a local national regional and international level. The practice of fighting for equality and recognition in ones own life is as much a part of femenist politics as is campaigning to improve the plight of others.

The personal is still political - this is where we most acutely experience discrimination, insult and abuse. It is through the aquisition of personal power and confidence that we can most easily change power relations between men and women. Institutional inequality and gender discrimination persists despite reams of legislation because we have not yet purged our sense of ourselves as a minority.

Be strong in yourselves Sisters and the world is yours for the taking.

Susan Willett

I could read this sort of utterly thoughtless piece in a newspaper. The beauty of open democracy for me was that unlike print journalists, you could read genuinely thoughtful writers who gave a non-banal account and increased your understanding of the way things are, why they are like that, and how they might change. This was print journalism at its most fatuous.

Should not the WSF and it's participants lead by example? If not, then what does it actually serve, if a woman can't even sleep safe for one night? And if in calling for democracy and equality -- there is no actual practice of either?

The fact is, another World is much more than possible -- It's necessary. And Women are an intrinsic part this and any other world, regardless of what men want, think, believe, say, or do.

Ahniwanika

One of the issues that is ignored when women's disadvantaged place in society is being discussed is the low proportion of women in the democratic legislatures of the world. The argument that it is not alone unjust but inefficient to have women, who are the majority of the electorate, so under-represented in parliament seems to me to be unanswerable. Women, because they live longer, are in the majority in all democracies. Yet they are in a minority of less than twenty per cent in the average parliament.

Changing societal structures so as to lessen women's disadvantage is a long term task. Using women's majority status in the electorate to increase their representation in parliament, however, takes only a minute at the next election. There is no excuse for the few women candidates who get through the biased selection process receiving on average fewer votes than male candidates.

Tony

Focussing on formal and visible structures only is sublimely unhelpful in understanding the dynamics of male-female relationships, which feminism has managed to reduce to the banal level of power in intimate relationships and the equally banal bean counting exercise in the public sphere. The latter banality is the result of deliberate confusion between equal opportunities and equal outcomes; the former falls beyond the scope of this comment.

What has been going on at a more fundamental level, i.e. the hi-jacking of Marxist tenets and conflating class and gender relationships, may well amount to an intellectual crime. It has effectively called curtains of what previously constituted a potentially large and inclusive movement for social change and progress. Call it the class struggle if you will. You may now understand why feminists, in stark contrast with other progressives, have found their natural home in the domain of political correctness and identity politics, the two gravediggers of political debate in the West. But that's yet another story.

I sincerely hope that Open Democracy remains true to its original objectives and will not fall for the easy guiles of PC; there has been slightly too much evidence of this happening lately.

I remember rumours of rape and theft from tents in Porto Alegre but it was felt to be outside elements rather than something that was in any way characteristic of the peaceful atmosphere.

It's my view that the women's movement has been quite unconstructive about solving the issue of gender imbalance. There are also imbalances of age, race, education, geography etc. That's the world we live in.

Infighting and boycotting of the forum (as has been called for by some, for instance in Asia) seems genuinely unhelpful to building a unified movement. It's much easier to glance inwards towards the organisers than outwards towards the universe we're meant to be changing.

With an agenda that's created by participants themselves, it's really upto participants to shape it as they want. Personally, I think it would be much cooler to transform the Forum through outward action rather than bickering and man-counting.

I would also, perhaps rather controversially, suggest that womens' perspectives cannot be genuinely developed without a parallel reconsideration of mens' perspectives. In discussing changes in womens' roles and expectations, we are also talking about changes in mens' roles and expectations, and there needs to be specific consideration of what this means.