Hello,
I'm Daniel Case, I live in the Hudson Valley region of the U.S. state of New York. I've had my account for six years (edited anonymously before that), have been an admin for three and a half and an oversighter for two. I also take lots of photos, I am somewhat active on Commons and I also infrequently work on Wiktionary and Wikiquote. Within Wikimedia I am on the board of the New York City chapter.
I have been interested in the gender-gap issue since I was the first male editor to sign up for WikiProject Fashion (it may be surprising; I certainly don't look or dress like I'm a fashion type) after having developed [[The Devil Wears Prada (film)]] and [[Anna Wintour]] to GA status; both of those grew out of writing [[The Devil Wears Prada (novel)]] in about the same amount of time it took to read it in early 2005. The WikiProject was relatively new at the time, and so I took it upon myself to find and tag all the talk pages of relevant articles (in the process, I created about 20 new categories as well). It shouldn't have surprised me, although it did, how wide a scope fashion-related articles include.
And yet, even today, that project is still minimally active. I know and knew why ... the shortage of female editors (see this diff as well: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Fashion...). It doesn't surprise me that some of the examples of gender-related neglect Noam Cohen picked for his article involve articles within WP:FASHION's scope ... [[friendship bracelets]], [[Jimmy Choo]] and I suppose even the various [[Sex and the City]] episodes (It seems that, as usually occurs when media coverage of Wikipedia calls out a specific article as deficient, there has been much work done since then on the article, although most of it was about cleaning up the xlinks section). That's hardly new ... back in 2005 [[Alexandra Shulman]], editor of British Vogue, gave [[haute couture]] a zero in a Guardian review (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Haute_couture#The_Guardian). The article has been slightly improved since then (at least it has pictures!) but it's still got a ways to go.
I see this effect on articles in other WikiProjects where you'd probably expect a higher concentration of female contributors, like WikiProject Education (WP:EDU), where the talk page registers about one edit every few weeks on average (at a presentation I was at at one of our conferences in NY, someone showed how the activity on a project talk page is the most reliable indicator of the overall health of the project). WP:SOAPS (the soap operas project) seems to be an exception, but it may be one that proves the rule.
Anyway, with that long introduction out of the way, I saw something in Kim's intro that I wanted to elaborate on:
Maybe I am wrong, but there is a something we can use, and that is data mining. Just as the gender gap was discovered. Basically, what is needed is an analysis of the data and if there is a difference in the editing pattern of men and women. We can than use those results to actually get a better idea why women are absent.
We *definitely* need figures with more nuances than just 87/13. For starters ...
* ... does that figure cover all editors, ever, or just the 3,000 or so most active ones?
* Is it specific to the English Wikipedia? If not, do any other languates or projects show significant differences (I'd be interested, for instance, to see what the figure is on the Swedish Wikipedia, and after Delphine's comments the Francophone WP as well)?
* Does it cover all editors, all registered editors, or just those in the latter group where a gender can be determined? (Some editors seem to prefer leaving that indeterminate). If so, what does the percentage come down to when we include those numbers?
* And as noted by Kim, within that 13 percent, can we do any analysis of editing patterns there to see if there is any difference from the community as a whole?
Daniel Case