When I entered Wikipedia, I discovered a side of the internet I had never encountered before, and intend never to encounter again; it's a menacing and combative atmosphere that is extremely aversive to me. I recently read somewhere that Wikipedia regulars, as a rule, come from usenet or from gaming, where that kind of atmosphere is apparently an integral and desired part of the experience (I wouldn't know, having no experience with either), and have brought that atmosphere to Wikipedia. As long as that atmosphere characterizes Wikipedia, it is going to drive away anyone who doesn't thrive on that kind of pugnacious taunting get-the-enemy-before-he-gets-you kind of attitude, and I suspect a lot of women would be included in those who don't thrive in that kind of environment.
I'm not singling your post out, Ism, but just quoting this as an example of a theme I've seen in other posts here and on the Times' discussions.
This is so *not* the Wikipedia I've been actively involved in for six years now. I allow that it exists for some people; I've never been one. I have had some intemperate moments in discussions and differences of opinion with other editors over article content or policy issues, but I have always kept our civility and no-personal-attacks policies in mind and have done my best to remain collegial. And by and large I've felt the same reciprocated by almost all the other editors involved.
I venture to suggest that perhaps this is because what I'm most interested in doing, and what I put a great deal of effort into, is creating, maintaining and improving content. When I hear (or rather, read) editors who complain about this, it's almost a given that you can look at their contrib histories and see very little in the way of recent edits to article namespace, and of those even fewer that aren't related to talk-page or policy-page discussions they were devoting most of their energy to.
Now, there are some people who are good at online conflict resolution, and they should not be discouraged from this type of editing. But there are plenty of other editors who let themselves get sucked into long discussions on AN/I or elsewhere that have little to do with them directly when they really ought to be doing what they came to Wikipedia to do. And I also grant that I don't regularly edit in any topic areas, such as those mirroring real-life ethnic or political conflicts, that have been notably rancorous.
That said, I recall at WikiXDC a couple of weekends ago one of my best Wikipedia moments ever. During the trivia contest at the end, one question was "This page, the largest one on the project, takes up an entire gigabyte when all of its archives are included." The answer, of course, is AN/I. When that was announced, someone near me, a longtime member of the community and active editor whom I'd not met or even known of before the event, asked "What's AN/I?"
I wish we had a hundred highly active editors who had to ask that question. A thousand, even.
And so to bring this back to the gendergap subject, I would pass along my observation that I have noticed in most of the female editors I am acquainted with who've been part of the project for a long time is that they, too, have concentrated primarily on the content areas they've been interested in and seem to keep the drama to a minimum.
Daniel Case