<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="" lang="EN-GB">Hello. Let me
introduce myself. My name is Joan Gomà and I am a man. As you can understand my
name very often produce funny situations. So I think having a non biased view of the
reality is important.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="" lang="EN-GB"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="" lang="EN-GB">I am
Catalan wikipedian and president of </span><span style="" lang="EN-GB">Amical Viquipèdia </span><span style="" lang="EN-GB">the Catalan association of wikipedians. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="" lang="EN-GB"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="" lang="EN-GB">I am highly
interested in understanding and closing the gender’s gap for many reasons. It
is not the less important that I believe that closing the gender gap can help
us in closing the big gap.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="" lang="EN-GB"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="" lang="EN-GB">For me the
big gap is the gap between the people that could contribute to Wikipedia and
those who actually do. For example we need more people from educational system
where women are overrepresented.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="" lang="EN-GB"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="" lang="EN-GB">We can build
hypothesis, give opinions and make trials. For example Catalan wikipedians we
changed the name of our association from “Amics de la Viquipèdia” (male
friends of Wikipedia) to “Amical Vquipèdia” (friends of wikipedia). Catalan wikipedians
are happy with this change but we can’t say that today there is a single
wikipedian more because of it.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="" lang="EN-GB"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="" lang="EN-GB">I think
that we should start accurately measuring the amount of the gap. I have reasons
to think that our figures are biased. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="" lang="EN-GB"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="" lang="EN-GB">To start they
are based upon the people answering a survey. In Catalan Wikipedia we survey
the readers periodically and I can assure that people answering is not
representative of the general population. More than 30% of the people answering
the survey say they are authors of Wikipedia. This is clearly far away from the
average readership behaviour. So as we are using figures based on the people answering
the survey if women where less (or more) inclined than men to answer we would
have an underestimation (or overestimation) of women writing wikipedia. I guess
women are less inclined than men to answer because only 15% of answers were
from women and it seems to me that the use of Wikipedia is much more equalitarian.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="" lang="EN-GB"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="" lang="EN-GB">Another
factor is the meaning of the words. In our survey we ask them for the reasons not
to contribute. There are several women saying: mmm… well… in fact I have
contributed a bit but not very often because…. It seems that women have a more
restrictive understanding off the words “contributing to Wikipedia”. It could
be that you have several women making a small contribution once a month and saying
they are not contributing to write Wikipedia while several men having created their
personal page several years ago and doing nothing else saying yes I am contributor
to wikipedia. This feeling is reinforced when you look at this proportion by
gender. 35% of men answering the survey say they write while only 9% of women
say they write.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="" lang="EN-GB"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="" lang="EN-GB">We are looking
for aids to finance a more rigorous survey based on personal interviews. We
will share with you our findings.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="" lang="EN-GB"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="" lang="EN-GB">Clues we
can learn from actual results come from differences in reasons to read and
write Wikipedia and the topics of interest. The vast majority of them are very similar
between men and women but there are few meaningful differences:</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="" lang="EN-GB"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="" lang="EN-GB">In the
reasons to read Wikipedia women use it more than men to study and as a complementary
source of information while men use it more than women as a leisure activity. In
the reasons to write men are more motivated than women by patriotism while
women are more motivated than men by developing writing skills and knowing
people.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="" lang="EN-GB"> </span></p>
<span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman";" lang="EN-GB">Regarding the topics of interest women are
underrepresented in technology.</span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman";" lang="EN-GB"></span>