Hi all, I guess it&#39;s my turn for an introduction. I&#39;m Karen and yes, I too am both female and a Wikipedian. I leave near New York City and am active in the Wikimedia NYC chapter, where I sometimes refer to myself as the token female (though I&#39;m not actually, but sometimes it feels like it). I&#39;ve been worrying for a good while now about what exactly keeps women turned off from Wikipedia, and I think there&#39;s a couple of factors. To quote from a post I made on another website about this topic:<br>

<br><i>The gender gap on Wikipedia is one of my pet peeves. It&#39;s real, it&#39;s 
undeniable, and it&#39;s only partially in our control, I think. Wikipedia 
can be a fighty place, no doubt. To stick around there can require you 
to be willing to do the virtual equivalent of stomping on someone&#39;s foot
 when they get in your face, which a lot of women, myself included, find
 difficult. Even more important to this issue, I think, though, is that 
it can require you to judge your own competence and decide it&#39;s high. If
 I might draw gross generalization here for a moment, imagine the 
following scenario:<br>
<br>
You&#39;re wandering around Wikipedia, and you come across the Friendship 
Bracelet article. Shock! You actually know a lot about friendship 
bracelets, and you can fill in a lot of the obvious gaps in the article 
with what you know! Do you:<br>
a) Fill in those gaps. This isn&#39;t controversial information, after all!<br>
b) Think about it, then decide that probably if it were that easy, 
someone else would already have done it, and therefore you are likely to
 be missing something about how this whole thing works<br>
<br>
Did you pick option A? You&#39;re a bit more likely to be male. B? Odds are 
on the side of you being female. No, this isn&#39;t across the board. I know
 plenty of people who cross those categories. But my sense is that this 
slight tendency of women to doubt their competence, coupled with the 
undeniable gatekeeping problem of experienced Wikipedians reverting just
 that sort of shouldn&#39;t-be-controversial-but-they-put-it-on-MY-article! 
edit, adds up to a repulsion factor.<br>
<br>
Women I know on Wikipedia often fall into one of two groups: those who 
will take you on, any time any place; and those who grind away in 
behind-the-scenes areas, copyediting articles, populating maps, cleaning
 up licensing rationales, and doing other largely-uncontroversial 
things. There seem to be more men who cover that middle ground, the 
ground where there&#39;s no fear of doing something noticeable but also no 
fear of talking back to someone if necessary.<br>
<br>
Again, I hasten to point out that this isn&#39;t true of everyone, by far. 
But as Kat Walsh wrote in an essay on the topic, it seems like 
it&#39;s less that Wikipedia isn&#39;t welcoming specifically to women and more 
that active, full-spectrum Wikipedianism is fitted best by certain 
personality types, and for some reason there seem to be more men who 
slot neatly into that type than women.</i><br><br>Those are my logical thoughts, but those of you who know me might remember that there is one, more illogical, thing that gets under my skin more than almost anything else: Wikipe-tan and her short skirt and thigh-high stockings. Why, WHY is it ok that we even joke about that being our &quot;mascot&quot;? An overtly sexualized, large-breasted woman who people regularly draw in bikinis and maid costumes? I mean, I know Wikipe-tan is not actually The Problem. But she&#39;s the most egregious example I think we have of the sort of unconscious &quot;boyzone&quot; culture that permeates a lot of collaborative sites these days. It doesn&#39;t even occur to a lot of men that that could be off-putting. They certainly don&#39;t mean it to be off-putting. And they&#39;re a little wounded when someone points out that, well, it <i>is</i>.<br>

<br>Ok, I&#39;ve ranted enough for now. I cede the floor.<br><br>-Karen<br>User:Fluffernutter<br>