Kerry Raymond wrote:
A. All the studies on female participation come up with low percentagesaround 10% plus or minus a few percent. Of course, it is possible that inall of the studies the women are choosing not to self-identify. It is aninherent difficulty in any study if people choose to not reveal information.But we know women make up large proportions of social media users, so ifwomens participation in Wikipedia is actually higher than studies show dueto reluctance to self-identify, it begs the question of why they are sounwilling to self-identify in the content of Wikipedia but not in othercontexts. Either way, it points to some problem. The last Wikimania recentlyreleased data that does show a higher level of female participation, about 1in 3, I think. It would be interesting to see how the male/female numbersbreak down across the various types of attendees, e.g. WMF staff, Chaptermembers, event organisers, etc. My suspicion is that women are in higherproportion among staffers, chapters, etc and this skews the Wikimaniaparticipation. I dont know how scholarships are awarded and whether womenare at any advantage in that process. B. A very interesting research paperhttp://files.grouplens.org/papers/wp-gender-wikisym2011.pdf shows that womenare less likely to survive the newbie stage than men. But, perhaps contraryto what many expected, their data does not suggest that women are moreeasily discouraged by being reverted (they show men and womens survivalrates in the face of reversion are similar) but that more womens edits arereverted than mens edits and this is the cause of higher attrition amongwomen. This has caused me to wonder if women as newbies are more attractedto articles where the risk of reversion is higher perhaps because there aremore policies to be considered (e.g. biographies of living people, notingthat women are predominantly the purchasers of celebrity magazines whichdeal mostly in content related to living people). The paper does show thatmen and women edit in different areas (men are more likely to edit ingeography and science for example) but the analysis is too high level toanswer my question. The other inherent limitation in any study of newbiesthat there is nothing in the initial signup to Wikipedia that asks you aboutyour gender (even optionally) so very few newbies are self-identifying aseither male or female at that time. So, its actually very hard to study thenon-surviving female newbies because you cant find them. This often meansour study of the experiences of newbies is based heavily on those who arestill around later to be studied or surveyed which introduces survivor biasinto the study. So this may be a consideration in relation to the findingsof this paper. Interview studies keep pointing to women not liking theabrasive environment of Wikipedia. Civility is a part of that issue.Although I think its not so much about the use of specific words, butrather a general culture of aggression. The people who use the swear wordsare simply much easier to spot and hold up as examples of the broaderproblem than those who engage in equally aggressive behaviour but do sociting [[WP:Policy]] and use the undo-button.  C. In relation to pro-active recruitment, I do a lot of that here inAustralia, edit training and edit-a-thons. While some of the edit-a-thonshave targeted women participants and are therefore predominantly women, edittraining events are generally not so targeted and attract both women andmen. From all of that I believe that women are not inherently disinterestedin contributing to Wikipedia. However, these events do not seem to createongoing 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 theworld. Generally, the one-event approach to edit training isnt sufficient.Greater success seems to come from regular events usually in auniversity/college setting, but regular events are a challenge to resourcewith volunteers (we have other things that have to be done in our lives).Interestingly, most of the people who currently attend our sessions aremiddle aged and older. Many struggle with the markup; I hope the visualeditor will address some of that problem. So I think we need to look atdiversity in terms of age as well as gender. But I dont think outreach isreally the answer because it cannot be done at the necessary scale. Its notthat we need to have a team of mentors, we need everyone to be willing tohelp 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 outreachevents as well as soon afterwards. Their edits are reverted (for what seemsto me to be no justifiable reason), new articles being speedily deleted orsplashed with messages about policies they dont know about and dontcomprehend, or left in an eternal limbo of rejection in Article forCreation. These folks are all good faith and they are all newcomers butthe policies of assume good faith and dont bite the newbies arecompletely ignored. We have many editors who are very aggressive. I have noidea if they are just angry with the world as a whole, or actually enjoybullying the newbies. While obviously there are benefits to a culture ofmentoring, even when I am in hand-holding edit-training mode (about asmentoring as it gets and I provide my contact details off-wiki as well ason-wiki for any follow-up), its difficult for me to justify to them why thenewbies edits are being undone because the edits simply arent that bad.The situation makes me very angry. It is not as if it is the same small poolof editors creating these problems where maybe one could try to take actionagainst them. It seems that we have such a huge pool of aggressive editorsthat our newbies will randomly attract the attention of one of them. (Or itmay be that some bullying personalities are actively on the lookout forvictims and newbies are a soft target).  So, all in all, I think if we need to go back to first principles theencyclopaedia anyone can edit and see that the aggressive nature of thecommunity is working against this intention and seek to curb thataggression. I think curbing the aggression would result in more editors bothmale and female. So in that light, I would have to say that I find theArbCom decision distressing as it appears to acknowledge and reinforce thatthe aggressive culture is both dominant and should continue to be so.  Kerry