On Wed, Mar 16, 2011 at 7:10 AM, <carolmooredc(a)verizon.net> wrote:
men post two to four times as much as women (depending
on the
week), with some men posting a couple times a day.
So, perhaps ironically, we're having a problem with participatory inequality
on the gender gap mailing list.
A power law of individual participation is a natural part of any open forum
on the Web. It just seems like, just as on Wikipedia, we want to swing the
distribution toward more women as well as men.
Maybe we should edit the Code of Conduct as a first step to try and
explicitly encourage the kind of participation what we want.[1]
Perhaps guys leaving the floor open a bit more for women would help.
("Ladies first" as part of the code of conduct? Is that joke too meta to be
effective?) I don't think it can hurt to try anyway.
I think it's going to take a lot more than men being quieter though.
One feeling I've had is that we should do more person-to-person outreach to
women who are currently editors. They're the type that may even think that
there is no problem, because they overcame the barriers on their own. But
we're probably missing the voices of *hundreds* of women Wikipedians
here. (Chaoticfluffy, want to help me make a list of talk pages to hit?)
1.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Gender_gap#Discuss
--
Steven Walling
Fellow at Wikimedia Foundation
wikimediafoundation.org