Seeing diversity as well as reading about it ... - Gendergap

12 Oct 2012

When we’ve focused on making article content more gender-inclusive here, we’ve usually
considered only the text. But a recent edit of mine reminded me that that’s not the only
place we can do this.

A month or so ago, on a short train trip to a city near us, my son (at my suggestion) took
a video of the conductor of what was to be our train home lining the switch (point to
those of you English speakers outside of North America) to bring the train onto the track
next to the platform for boarding. He and I have been making videos for Wikipedia since
Wikimania (when I realized that we could do it, and it occurred to me for other reasons
that this might be another way to make the encyclopedia more welcoming to female readers
and editors) and I had noticed that [[railroad switch]] had neither photo nor video of
someone actually making the adjustment, an operation that takes place thousands of times a
day on railroads all over the planet and is fundamental to rail transport (yes, there was
a video of some tracks in Hong Kong being switched, but it was so short and subtle as to
be nearly useless).

It took me a while to get around to editing the video and convert it to .ogv format, then
upload it
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NJ_Transit_conductor_lines_a_switch_in_Po…).
Only after I did, and then added it to the article, did I pleasantly realize that it
showed a young African-American woman (so score that double for diversity of
representation) doing something not always associated with women (although, of course, as
we all know, there are many women who work as passenger rail conductors).

Of course, when I look at the “Videos of women” category on Commons
(http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Videos_of_women) and see both how
underpopulated it is and how it’s subdivided, I remember that we still have a lot of work
to do.

Daniel Case