Hey folks!
When Asaf of the Israeli chapter started up the Wikipedia in Developing Countries list, he did something that I thought was really great: he asked everybody who joined to introduce themselves, and talk a little about why they were interested in the list topic. Why don't we do the same thing here?
I can start:
I'm Sue Gardner; I'm the executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization that operates Wikipedia.
I'm interested in the Wikipedia gender gap for two reasons: 1) I'm a woman, and I am sometimes surprised/irritated/appalled at how thin Wikipedia is on some topics that interest me. I want Wikipedia to be as rich and complete and broad and deep as it possibly can be, so that I find what I'm looking for when I read it. And 2) I'm the ED of the Wikimedia Foundation, and our mission is to make the sum total of all human knowledge available to everyone. I know that Wikipedia is only going to be as good as the breadth & diversity of the people who contribute to it, so ensuring that women are fully represented on Wikipedia is, I think, a part of my job.
A little more background on me personally: I know that a lot of women on Wikipedia operate in predominantly male environments such as science, technology, engineering and math. That's not my situation. I spent most of my career at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, which is an extremely female-friendly environment with lots of women throughout the organization at every level, and I also worked at the Women's Television Network, which had at the time a 98% female staff. So I am very used to operating in female-majority cultures. This means that when I first joined Wikimedia in 2007, it was a pretty big culture shock to me.
But I'll also say that I've never personally witnessed misogyny on the Wikimedia projects, and I don't believe that Wikimedia editors, by and large, are sexist. (I know that some people would disagree with that.) I think our gender gap has its origins mainly in the external environment, and the contributing factors are many of the same ones that result in women being underrepresented in the STEM fields. Plus I don't think the Wikimedia movement has yet done a sufficiently good job of stressing the societal benefits of our work (which I think would be appealing for lots of women): rather, we've let our work be defined by others as solely technical and 'geeky.' Plus, women don't typically have as much leisure time as men for pursuits like Wikipedia, and the time they do have tends to be spent in groups rather than at a computer. I say all that only because I think lots of women would edit Wikipedia if they had a clearer understanding of what it is, and why it exists.
I should also say: I think that all forms of diversity --geographic, political, ideological, cultural, sexual, age-related, etc.-- are important. But having said that, I do think our gender skew is particularly bad, so even though I feel uncomfortable paying special attention to it, I believe it's probably defensible.
My hope for this list is that it'll become a space where Wikipedians and non-Wikipedians can share research and information and tactics for making Wikipedia more attractive to women editors. Myself, I'm not particularly interested in debates about 'how bad the problem is' or 'is there really a problem' or 'whose fault is this problem anyway.' I'm actually not all that interested in the origins of the gender gap, except insofar as they shed light on possible solutions.
Following the story in the Times today, I got lots of e-mails from people who want to help us fix things. I'm not going to forward the mails here without people's permission, but I will probably reach out to many of those folks and invite them to join this list.
Oh: and a little background. Erik Moeller, my deputy, created this list today because I asked him to, and after floating the notion on the internal-l mailing list, it looked like there might be sufficient interest to make it worthwhile. My understanding is that this is NOT a women-only list; it's a list for people who are interested in the gender gap on Wikipedia, who want to help attract/support more female editors.
Thanks, Sue
-- Sue Gardner Executive Director Wikimedia Foundation
415 839 6885 office 415 816 9967 cell
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