You make many good points, Kerry, that speak for themselves. This reply merely addresses one of them: the availability of data.

On Tue, Dec 2, 2014 at 2:05 AM, Kerry Raymond <kerry.raymond@gmail.com> wrote:

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.

I am not aware of any such survey data released at Wikimania. (A submission highlighting that only 6% of contributors to the Dutch Wikipedia are women was rejected[1].)

I wonder whether you are remembering a statistic about attendance at Wikimania itself, in which case it may be interesting to note that female Wikimedians appear to value situations providing an opportunity for real, face-to-face contact more than male Wikimedians do, and are statistically more likely to attend such events than male contributors.

Several of you are mentioning the importance of regularly updated gender split data.

To recap, past survey results for female participation were:

· 12.64% in the 2010 UNU survey[2],

· 8.5% and 9% in the 2011 editor surveys[3][4], and

· 16.1% in the re-analysis of the UNU survey data by Shaw and Hill (2013, apparently done without the input of the original study authors; note that Hill serves on the Wikimedia Foundation advisory board).[5]

The 2012 results remain unreported to date.

For the record, on 4 March 2013 (21 months ago), Tilman Bayer said[7] in response to an inquiry on Meta,

---o0o---

Beckie and I have been working on the data during the last few days, and we hope we can wrap this up soon. In any case, we still have the ambition of keeping the timespan between the conclusion of the survey and the publication of the first results shorter than in the preceding editors survey. Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 21:13, 4 March 2013 (UTC)

---o0o---

There have been half a dozen inquiries from Wikimedians on Meta for the 2012 editor survey's gender split data over the past few weeks[6]:

· 30 August 2014 by Fæ and myself

· 4 September 2014 by SlimVirgin

· 25 November 2014 by myself

· 27 November 2014 by myself

· 28 November 2014 by Kathleen McCook

This is in addition to multiple inquiries for this data made on this list, and on Tilman's user talk pages in his home wiki.

There has not been a single reply to any of these queries to date from Tilman or anyone else in the Foundation.

It would be great if members of this list could individually help find out why this data is not being released, and indeed why the Foundation appears to have stopped running editor surveys altogether – another question that has been asked and remained unanswered[7] – and then report back here with any information they are able to glean.

I am sorry if my going on about this comes across as pushy, but I am frankly mystified why it is so difficult to receive answers to such questions.

Andreas

[1] http://wikimania2014.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions/Women_on_Wikipedia

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20130821015449/http://www.wikipediasurvey.org/docs/Wikipedia_Overview_15March2010-FINAL.pdf#page8

[3] https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Editor_Survey_Report_-_April_2011.pdf&page=3

[4] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikipedia_editors_are_predominantly_male_EN.svg

[5] http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0065782

[6] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Tbayer_(WMF)#2012_editor_survey, https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_talk:Wikipedia_Editor_Survey_2012#Looking_for_survey_results

[7] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_talk:Wikipedia_Editor_Survey_2012#How_long