The math behind that little statistic was so terrible I had to write a
blog post about it.

http://blog.mvolz.com/2014/08/what-percentage-of-wikipedia-editors-are-mums/

First off, in their blog post, Andreas & Collida multiply the
percentage of contributor respondents who were women (12.64%) by the
percentage of all respondents (contributor and reader, male and
female) who were parents- 14.72%-  while seemingly missing that the
study in fact provided a breakdown of this: 13.7% of all female
respondents were parents. (15.1% of the male respondents were).

Secondly, Andreas & Collida cherry pick a lower bound number for women
contributors (8.5%) (source unkown) and presented the number from the
survey (12.64%) as an upper bound. A literature search gave me an
upper bound of 16.1% from Hill & Shaw.

Furthermore, the source Andreas & Collida used contained biased
statistics. The original  WMF/UNU-MERIT report had no methods section
and didn’t control for sampling bias. The Hill & Shaw paper  controls
for sample bias based on a survey by Pew, which used better sampling
methods.

Hill & Shaw tried to control for the survey’s selection bias and found
that they “estimate that females, married people, and individuals with
children were underrepresented in the  WMF/UNU-MERIT sample while
immigrants and students were overrepresented.”

This means that the two statistics Andreas & Collida chose to multiply
together; female editors/contributors and males and females with
children- were *both* underestimates in the WMF/UNU-MERIT survey.

Hill & Shaw provide the adjusted numbers for these accordingly; they
estimate that 16.1% of contributors (as opposed to 12.64%) are female,
and that 25.3% have children. We can perform a similar analysis as
Andreas & Collida using those adjusted numbers by multiplying them, a
result of about 4.1%- more than double their highest estimate.

Of course, this number is also flawed; we don’t have the actual
breakdown of what percentage of female contributors have children, and
instead are multiplying aggregate numbers. A better estimate could be
obtained by redoing Hill & Shaw‘s analysis on the raw dataset.

On Tue, Aug 26, 2014 at 9:14 PM, Tim Davenport <shoehutch@gmail.com> wrote:
> There is a new blog post up on Wikipedia-criticism site Wikipediocracy that
> should be of interest to this list.
>
> Andreas Kolbe with Nathalie Collida, "Why Women Have No Time For Wikipedia:
> Thoughts on the Online Encyclopedia's Gender Imbalance."
>
> http://wikipediocracy.com/2014/08/26/why-women-have-no-time-for-wikipedia/
>
> One interesting assertion made by the authors in their lengthy essay is that
> fewer than 1 in 50 WP contributors is a mother:
>
> "It is sometimes argued that women simply have less time to contribute to
> Wikipedia, due to family commitments. This is a fallacy. Firstly, the United
> Nations University survey found that only 33.29% of respondents had a
> partner, and only 14.72% had children. The difference between readers and
> contributors was negligible here, and the survey report did not indicate any
> difference in these percentages for male and female respondents. It is
> patently obvious that girls and women in the age groups that are most
> strongly represented in Wikipedia’s demographics typically do not yet have
> families of their own. Their lack of participation is unrelated to their
> being bogged down by family responsibilities.
>
> "Of course, these figures also tell us something else: if only 14.72% of
> contributors have children, and the percentage of female contributors lies
> somewhere between 8.5% and 12.64%, then it looks like only 1.25%–1.86% of
> Wikipedia contributors are mothers.
>
> "That is less than 1 in 50."
>
>
> Tim Davenport
> "Carrite" on WP /// "Randy from Boise" on WPO
>
>
>

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