Kathy McGraw, Riverside County CA Real Estate (CELLing Realty) commented and asked me concerning yesterday’s post:

 

Gender diversified....love that term :)  I love Twitterqueens tag line...and so now that it is evolving, and not everyone is from AR (thank gawd for diversity) nor are they all REALTORS...is the goal still the same?  Do you remember AR when it was a relatively small group....now it is too large to manage effectively and we  never even see even 1/100th of all the posts.

 

 

Kathy- poser of the tough questions! I think I had noticed early on during the debate about allowing men to be members of TwitterQueens a brief discussion about whether the mission statement would be diluted. At that time, it was "Women empowering women in the understanding and use of emerging social media techniques." Even earlier on, we had assumed that the interest in the group would be mostly generated in the real estate field, and we had tagged the FB fan page "Leading Women in Real Estate and Social Media." I liked that line, because it can be read both ways.

But group membership evolved.  We, nearly immediately, had members who were at the periphery of the real estate industry, or outside of it altogether.  These women were just so completely an asset- as they would have been to any association- that it would have been wrong to disallow their contributions. I don’t think that it really changed the focus of the group, as we did more than “talk shop”- and we sign in listing our jobs and locations so we can search for, say, a Realtor to refer to in North Carolina.

The second evolution caused more controversy. There were a couple of men who always entered the fray when we were chatting online with the tag #twitterqueens. They joined in with the girltalk- sometimes sharing advice, sometimes sharing recipes, always being supportive.  So it didn’t seem like that big a deal when one of them signed up, then the next. Soon we had a small cadre of men signed on as TwitterQueens- right now it appears that one in seven or so of our population is male.

I informally watched the conversation surrounding this-  gender diverse membership  wasn’t  unanimously backed, but the dissent was small, and focused around the mission statement as opposed to the people.  We considered that this would likely be a self-selecting group of men- the men who joined, as well the women, would support the goals of the group.  They wrote posts on social media tips, reasons for their joining,  and shared personal stories - these guys are also on Active Rain and are frequent posters here.

But, yes. Group dynamic is different. Our TwitterDudes have written many of the posts and positioned themselves to help; almost in inverse fashion to the general societal structure, the men contribute quite a bit, almost as if to prove their relevance.

Possibly the only way to find out whether allowing boys into the clubhouse is detrimental would be to set up a control population comprised solely of women, matched for intelligence and talent, and compare the success of one over the other. Frankly, I’m not up for it! I guess the best I can do is say that the addition of any other person is going to affect group dynamic.