On Wed, Mar 16, 2011 at 7:10 AM,  <span dir="ltr">&lt;<a href="mailto:carolmooredc@verizon.net">carolmooredc@verizon.net</a>&gt;</span> wrote:<br><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">

<div id=":1ja">men post two to four times as much as women (depending on the<br>
week), with some men posting a couple times a day.</div></blockquote></div><div><div><div><br></div><div>So, perhaps ironically, we&#39;re having a problem with participatory inequality on the gender gap mailing list.</div>

<div><br></div><div><meta charset="utf-8">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.</div>

<div><br></div><div>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] </div><div><br></div><div>Perhaps guys leaving the floor open a bit more for women would help. (&quot;Ladies first&quot; as part of the code of conduct? Is that joke too meta to be effective?) I don&#39;t think it can hurt to try anyway.</div>

<div><br></div><div>I think it&#39;s going to take a lot more than men being quieter though. </div><div><br></div><div>One feeling I&#39;ve had is that we should do more person-to-person outreach to women who are currently editors. They&#39;re the type that may even think that there is no problem, because they overcame the barriers on their own. But we&#39;re probably missing the voices of <i>hundreds</i> of women Wikipedians here. (Chaoticfluffy, want to help me make a list of talk pages to hit?)</div>

<meta charset="utf-8"><div><br></div><div>1. <a href="http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Gender_gap#Discuss">http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Gender_gap#Discuss</a></div><div><br></div><div>-- <br>Steven Walling<div>Fellow at Wikimedia Foundation</div>

<div><a href="http://wikimediafoundation.org" target="_blank">wikimediafoundation.org</a></div><br>
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