Hello. I'm Miguel Angel, from Spain, and I work as a (male) nurse.
I'd like to point out that the gender gap is not only present in the English
Wikipedia, so, Sue, your knowledge about women is -I presume- based on women from certain
culture, i.e., the North American culture. But there are many other countries in the world
with the same problem, and the solution maybe should be a bit different for them. My
opinion is that you're treating the gender gap with a culture gap vision, and
that's not good for all the women who don't speak English. For example, in Spain a
mascot is nothing to write home about. We don't pay attention to such things, we
don't have mascots in our soccer teams, and the like, and I think that there's not
so much aggresivity against women here; in fact I think that the origin of the problem is
different: maybe an absence of a WYSIWYG editor. In my experience, men are a bit more
obsessive in their work than women, so they don't mind if they have to remember
scripts and learn to use the somehow complex syntax required to add content in a proper
way (many times a good look for the content is enough to guarantee it won't be
deleted). Or maybe it's the look of the site, not attractive enough (was Vector tested
by women?), or maybe it's an absence of motivation in the main pages, for example,
something like making women know why it's so important to contribute, how they will
*help* other people (schools, people with difficulties to access knowledge, etc.), because
women tend to focus their attention on people, instead of things, as men do, or maybe a
better comunication between users (a chat room accesible from the discussion pages to
discuss some topics ouside the page before "talking seriously" and preventing
the history to be filled with neverending discussions on absurd topics would be great).
Well, those are a few ideas from a Spanish user.
Regards
Miguel Angel
Nurse (and also MD).
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