Hello. Let me introduce myself. My name is Joan Gomà and I am a man. As you can understand my name very often produce funny situations. So I think having a non biased view of the reality is important.

I am Catalan wikipedian and president of Amical Viquipèdia the Catalan association of wikipedians.

I am highly interested in understanding and closing the gender’s gap for many reasons. It is not the less important that I believe that closing the gender gap can help us in closing the big gap.

For me the big gap is the gap between the people that could contribute to Wikipedia and those who actually do. For example we need more people from educational system where women are overrepresented.

We can build hypothesis, give opinions and make trials. For example Catalan wikipedians we changed the name of our association from “Amics de la Viquipèdia” (male friends of Wikipedia) to “Amical Vquipèdia” (friends of wikipedia). Catalan wikipedians are happy with this change but we can’t say that today there is a single wikipedian more because of it.

I think that we should start accurately measuring the amount of the gap. I have reasons to think that our figures are biased.

To start they are based upon the people answering a survey. In Catalan Wikipedia we survey the readers periodically and I can assure that people answering is not representative of the general population. More than 30% of the people answering the survey say they are authors of Wikipedia. This is clearly far away from the average readership behaviour. So as we are using figures based on the people answering the survey if women where less (or more) inclined than men to answer we would have an underestimation (or overestimation) of women writing wikipedia. I guess women are less inclined than men to answer because only 15% of answers were from women and it seems to me that the use of Wikipedia is much more equalitarian.

Another factor is the meaning of the words. In our survey we ask them for the reasons not to contribute. There are several women saying: mmm… well… in fact I have contributed a bit but not very often because…. It seems that women have a more restrictive understanding off the words “contributing to Wikipedia”. It could be that you have several women making a small contribution once a month and saying they are not contributing to write Wikipedia while several men having created their personal page several years ago and doing nothing else saying yes I am contributor to wikipedia. This feeling is reinforced when you look at this proportion by gender. 35% of men answering the survey say they write while only 9% of women say they write.

We are looking for aids to finance a more rigorous survey based on personal interviews. We will share with you our findings.

Clues we can learn from actual results come from differences in reasons to read and write Wikipedia and the topics of interest. The vast majority of them are very similar between men and women but there are few meaningful differences:

In the reasons to read Wikipedia women use it more than men to study and as a complementary source of information while men use it more than women as a leisure activity. In the reasons to write men are more motivated than women by patriotism while women are more motivated than men by developing writing skills and knowing people.