Laura is proposing the building of a dataset from publicly accessible information, and my comment relates to what information she will be able to derive from the publicly stated genders of the users working in the research topic area.
I'm not going to do any research on women's participation if the postdoc paper work goes through. :) Who participates is probably completely irrelevant to my research. Rather, the question is: What influence does Wikipedia have CONTENT WISE on people's thought formation on a topic? In this case, the topic is narrowly defined as women's sport in Australia.
If an article is written by men or women, it is unlikely to impact the overall perception of what people think of a topic unless there is some adequate theory being put forth based on research that in the case of Australian women's sport articles, the gender of the participants / editors impacts on content in such a way as to do that on scale. (For example, I've been one of the major writers of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lauren_Jackson and from the names involved, I am pretty certain http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samantha_Stosur has been written mostly by male contributors. Is there anything that would make you go FEMALE and MALE written article that if you were reading articles in your sport specific niche, these styles would impact your point of view about Wikipedia as a whole? I just don't think I've seen anything like that. In another area, if we were comparing articles about pornography to articles about education, maybe.)