I think the likelihood is fairly high that more active women are more likely
not to identify their gender. For what it's worth, I didn't hide my gender
as diligently for the first year or so that I actively edited and I think I
may have asked someone to use female pronouns at one point. It's only after
high profile cases of women being harassed on the internet (Kathy Sierra)
and after noticing that my neutral user name seemed to garner more respect
than posts I make in other parts of the net, where I use a female pseudonym,
that I decided to actively suppress my gender. If I weren't a particularly
active editor, it wouldn't be a big deal for me. I'm so invested in
Wikipedia that gender based harassment or even the decreased perception of
my capability would be disruptive to me if I chose to identify myself
on-wiki.
Nepenthe
On Fri, Feb 11, 2011 at 11:26 AM, Sage Ross <sross(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
We're crossing streams a bit between this list and
wikitech-l.
On Fri, Feb 11, 2011 at 10:58 AM, Lars Aronsson <lars(a)aronsson.se>
wrote on wikitech-l:
One thing that could be interesting is to trace
the career of users: When they register, how
frequent they edit, if the frequency varies
over time, and if these patterns differ between
men and women and the gender-anonymous.
User:Dispenser is working on something similar, I think for the next
Signpost.
Take a look at this (a work in progress and not mine, so please don't
distribute):
http://toolserver.org/~dispenser/temp/gender/total_edit_zero_2011-02-10.png
The table at the left traces gender identification rates for editors
with less than or equal to the listed number of edits (but more than
the previous row). So the first row is editors with 0 edits, the
second is editors with 1 edit, the third is editors with 2-3 edits,
then 4-7 edits, etc. The last row is everyone with over ~65k edits
(and less than 5,000,000). It's based on essentially the 250,000 most
recent users who have edited or created an account.
So the takeaways are:
a) the more edits you make, the more likely you are to declare your gender.
b) the ratio of declared females to males falls from about 20% for
people who make just zero or one edit, to a stable 5-6% for people who
make 1000 or more edits.
Of course, as Woonpton notes, there could be factors that distort
that. Maybe women who become active editors are more likely than
other women to *not* declare gender. But at first glance, it would
seem that the gender gap is larger among very active editors.
-Sage
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