I first pitched this idea to Aaron Halfaker in July, but nothing has
happened so far, so I wanted to pitch it to the whole analytics team....
The Foundation has been discussing the gender gap and how to address it
since I started 4 years ago. Often there is discussion of how particular
features or projects might theoretically impact the gender gap: the
Education Program, Visual Editor, WikiLove, editathons, etc. Unfortunately,
we have absolutely no idea if any of these things have any impact. Nor do
we have any idea if the gender gap is getting better or worse or staying
the same. All we have is a handful of non-comparable data points based on
surveys with different methodologies.
The main obstacle to generating useful gender gap data has always been that
we don't have reliable absolute numbers because editors do not reliably
indicate their gender in the preferences. There is nothing stopping us,
however, from analysing *relative* trends using existing data. For example,
we could generate graphs showing the relative difference per month in edits
by men and women and this data would be unaffected by the unreliability of
the absolute numbers (since we would only be looking at changes in the
percentages).
This is possible right now with existing data and shouldn't be very hard to
generate (although the queries will be expensive). To see a full
explanation of the idea, please check out the Trello card and add comments
there:
https://trello.com/c/vLkEILa6/369-gender-edit-dashboard
Ryan Kaldari