On 7/2/11 2:32 PM, Casey Brown wrote:
In march 2010 WP had 12% and now its on 9%? Am I right or I'm missing
something? :\
The percentage isn't necessarily going down. The two percentages were found through surveys with pretty different methodologies. I think the most recent survey was intended to be "more scientific" in how it was executed, hopefully giving a more accurate snapshot and more specific numbers. So, pretty much, it's most likely been between 9% and 12% all along, we're just getting an either more accurate number or just a different amount of woman participated -- it doesn't mean that we're doing worse and are losing women we already had.
To add to what Casey said in an earlier email, the methodology that we used for conducting the two surveys is slightly different and we can attribute the variability in gender count to it. The recent survey was only shown to those who have an account on Wikipedia, and were logged in during the one week when the survey was in field. In addition, to avoid the data being skewed towards more frequent editors, we showed the banner only once. This ensured that we had a higher probability of participation from editors rather than readers and the sample did not skew towards more frequent editors, and I feel that this could account for variability in the data. Mani