Good question. I wonder if this sort of survey has been done more generally for conferences? I would imagine all the factors mentioned here would apply to conference attendance generally, not specific to Wikimania. Which might speak to how effective we could reasonably expect conferences to be in addressing the gender gap.

-Pete


On Jul 5, 2012, at 8:18 AM, Karen Sue Rolph wrote:

Dear colleagues,

I hope someone with survey design experience will be at this event and collect data on how many mothers manage to attend this event.  We need to know whether women have adult or young children, and whether they are single parents, their ethnicity, and professional training.  This will provide truly useful data, if done scientifically.  I can help write an instrument if called upon to do so.  Let us not overlook single parent fathers and alternative parents.  My hypothesis is that there will be extremely few of any of these.  Dads (in some ethnicities) get a social 'bonus' for being parents (increased social status), unlike mothers, so its important to distinguish clearly who is supporting and raising children, not just having parented and kids exist in the world kinds of data.

KSRolph
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Pete Forsyth
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