Kerry Raymond wrote:
A.	All the studies on female participation come up with low percentages
around 10% plus or minus a few percent. Of course, it is possible that in
all of the studies the women are choosing not to self-identify. It is an
inherent difficulty in any study if people choose to not reveal information.
But we know women make up large proportions of social media users, so if
women’s participation in Wikipedia is actually higher than studies show due
to reluctance to self-identify, it begs the question of why they are so
unwilling to self-identify in the content of Wikipedia but not in other
contexts. Either way, it points to some problem. The last Wikimania recently
released data that does show a higher level of female participation, about 1
in 3, I think. It would be interesting to see how the male/female numbers
break down across the various types of attendees, e.g. WMF staff, Chapter
members, event organisers, etc. My suspicion is that women are in higher
proportion among staffers, chapters, etc and this skews the Wikimania
participation. I don’t know how scholarships are awarded and whether women
are at any advantage in that process.

 

B.	A very interesting research paper
http://files.grouplens.org/papers/wp-gender-wikisym2011.pdf shows that women
are less likely to survive the newbie stage than men. But, perhaps contrary
to what many expected, their data does not suggest that women are more
easily discouraged by being reverted (they show men and women’s survival
rates in the face of reversion are similar) but that more women’s edits are
reverted than men’s edits and this is the cause of higher attrition among
women. This has caused me to wonder if women as newbies are more attracted
to articles where the risk of reversion is higher perhaps because there are
more policies to be considered (e.g. biographies of living people, noting
that women are predominantly the purchasers of “celebrity” magazines which
deal mostly in content related to living people). The paper does show that
men and women edit in different areas (men are more likely to edit in
geography and science for example) but the analysis is too high level to
answer my question. The other inherent limitation in any study of newbies
that there is nothing in the initial signup to Wikipedia that asks you about
your gender (even optionally) so very few newbies are self-identifying as
either male or female at that time. So, it’s actually very hard to study the
non-surviving female newbies because you can’t find them. This often means
our study of the experiences of newbies is based heavily on those who are
still around later to be studied or surveyed which introduces survivor bias
into the study. So this may be a consideration in relation to the findings
of this paper. Interview studies keep pointing to women not liking the
abrasive environment of Wikipedia. Civility is a part of that issue.
Although I think it’s not so much about the use of specific words, but
rather a general culture of aggression. The people who use the swear words
are simply much easier to spot and hold up as examples of the broader
problem than those who engage in equally aggressive behaviour but do so
citing [[WP:Policy]] and use the undo-button. 

 

C.	In relation to pro-active recruitment, I do a lot of that here in
Australia, edit training and edit-a-thons. While some of the edit-a-thons
have targeted women participants and are therefore predominantly women, edit
training events are generally not so targeted and attract both women and
men. From all of that I believe that women are not inherently disinterested
in contributing to Wikipedia. However, these events do not seem to create
ongoing editors (whether female or male) and this experience is not unique.
A recent survey by the foundation found that this is the case all over the
world. Generally, the one-event approach to edit training isn’t sufficient.
Greater success seems to come from regular events usually in a
university/college setting, but regular events are a challenge to resource
with volunteers (we have other things that have to be done in our lives).
Interestingly, most of the people who currently attend our sessions are
middle aged and older. Many struggle with the markup; I hope the visual
editor will address some of that problem. So I think we need to look at
diversity in terms of age as well as gender. But I don’t think outreach is
really the answer because it cannot be done at the necessary scale. It’s not
that we need to have a team of mentors, we need everyone to be willing to
help one another.

 

D.	One thing I learn from our outreach is that many of the newbies
(male and female) have unpleasant experiences even during the outreach
events as well as soon afterwards. Their edits are reverted (for what seems
to me to be no justifiable reason), new articles being speedily deleted or
splashed with messages about policies they don’t know about and don’t
comprehend, or left in an eternal limbo of rejection in Article for
Creation. These folks are all “good faith” and they are all newcomers but
the policies of “assume good faith” and “don’t bite the newbies” are
completely ignored. We have many editors who are very aggressive. I have no
idea if they are just angry with the world as a whole, or actually enjoy
bullying the newbies. While obviously there are benefits to a culture of
mentoring, even when I am in hand-holding edit-training mode (about as
mentoring as it gets and I provide my contact details off-wiki as well as
on-wiki for any follow-up), it’s difficult for me to justify to them why the
newbie’s edits are being undone because the edits simply aren’t that bad.
The situation makes me very angry. It is not as if it is the same small pool
of editors creating these problems where maybe one could try to take action
against them. It seems that we have such a huge pool of aggressive editors
that our newbies will randomly attract the attention of one of them. (Or it
may be that some bullying personalities are actively on the lookout for
victims and newbies are a soft target). 

 

So, all in all, I think if we need to go back to first principles “the
encyclopaedia anyone can edit” and see that the aggressive nature of the
community is working against this intention and seek to curb that
aggression. I think curbing the aggression would result in more editors both
male and female. So in that light, I would have to say that I find the
ArbCom decision distressing as it appears to acknowledge and reinforce that
the aggressive culture is both dominant and should continue to be so. 

 

Kerry