Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Call for journalist interviewing cohousers

[Ellen Keyne Seebacher (elle]

On Sun, Mar 18, 2012 at 07:01:39PM -0700, Dane Laverty wrote:

> Would you expand on the gender dynamics in cohousing? Your comment
> is fascinating to me -- I'd love to try living in a cohousing
> community but my wife has no interest in it.

I've been involved in my community since 2003, long before move-in,
and my memory is that in the clear majority of mixed-gender couples
who contacted us or joined the group, the woman was the one driving
the interest and the man went along for the ride.  (My own household,
where my spouse and I were about equally interested, was one of the
exceptions.)

We had one major significant exception where *he* was really
enthusiastic about cohousing, she really wasn't, and they joined and
dropped out multiple times before she convinced him to build a house
elsewhere.  But it's hard to think of other examples of men leading
reluctant women.

We do have two single male homeowners (hi, Bob!), but they're
outnumbered 2:1 by the single female homeowners.

Many of our teams have shown gender dynamics, too.  Facilitation (and
Coordinating, when we had it) has been largely run by women; Buildings
& Grounds is all men.  The gender balance has evened out considerably
since move-in, though; before that our Tech/Website and Mechanicals
teams were mostly male and most other teams mostly female :-)

-- 
Ellen Keyne Seebacher                   elle [at] pobox.com