So how can we measure what impact we're having on getting women to participate?
Over the next few months Wikimedia UK's very going to be adopting a rather more formal set of reporting procedures. I just wondered if people on this list had any thoughts about how we could build in some gender impact assessment into this reporting.
It should be fairly easy for the Board to ask for statistics on how many of the people attending events are men and how many are women. Ideally we would also have statistics on how many people attending events *who then go on to edit/join/otherwise take part* available by gender. It should be even easier to monitor the diversity of our staff (currently we have 2, both are male) and Wikimedians in Residence (also currently 2, both male) and indeed the board (err.... 7 men) - hopefully these statistics will be a bit better in a year's time.
Does anyone have any more thoughts on how we should approach this?
Regards,
Chris
PS. Also, you might be interested to know that we've identified a £10k budget for "broadening impact" - i.e. additional funding for projects which are aimed at women, Scotland, Wales, ethnic or linguistic minorities - I think this is a good thing but we do need to make sure the remaining £500k isn't spent only on white Englishmen ;-)
On Sat, Oct 1, 2011 at 8:41 PM, Chris Keating chriskeatingwiki@gmail.comwrote:
So how can we measure what impact we're having on getting women to participate?
Does anyone have any more thoughts on how we should approach this?
One possible way to measure is to track how many people transclude a gender related template ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Gender_user_templates ) on their user page. Not necessarily the greatest and most accurate statistic, and it only captures a very limited audience… but one additional methodology to include in a tool set.
On Sat, Oct 1, 2011 at 6:41 AM, Chris Keating chriskeatingwiki@gmail.comwrote:
So how can we measure what impact we're having on getting women to participate?
Over the next few months Wikimedia UK's very going to be adopting a rather more formal set of reporting procedures. I just wondered if people on this list had any thoughts about how we could build in some gender impact assessment into this reporting.
It should be fairly easy for the Board to ask for statistics on how many of the people attending events are men and how many are women. Ideally we would also have statistics on how many people attending events *who then go on to edit/join/otherwise take part* available by gender. It should be even easier to monitor the diversity of our staff (currently we have 2, both are male) and Wikimedians in Residence (also currently 2, both male) and indeed the board (err.... 7 men) - hopefully these statistics will be a bit better in a year's time.
Does anyone have any more thoughts on how we should approach this?
Regards,
Chris
PS. Also, you might be interested to know that we've identified a £10k budget for "broadening impact" - i.e. additional funding for projects which are aimed at women, Scotland, Wales, ethnic or linguistic minorities - I think this is a good thing but we do need to make sure the remaining £500k isn't spent only on white Englishmen ;-)
Chris,
Excellent that you are building measurable indicators into your plan. It is very basic to planning to have good measurable indicators. When we were doing the WMF Strategic Planning process, it was difficult to make good decisions in some instances because of lack of data. That is being changed at WMF now with many more surveys and other ways of capturing data. But we still need to build it into other processes, too. So, I applaud you for doing it. :-)
You have identified several good measures such as head counts of staff, chapter members, and people attending events.
Money spent is also a good measure.
Things such as offering shirts for sale in women's style and sizes could show if more women are participating more if sales go up.
(Sidenote:I really appreciated the WikiMania planning team in Israel offering shirts for women. While many younger females don't mind as much, most older females don't care for T-shirts made for the male figure and won't wear them out in public.)
Also dollars spent on projects targeted at females if outreach is being done. Like co-sponsoring events with women's groups.
Also, finding a way to measure editing contributions from male v. female coming from UK would be good. That is more difficult but perhaps doable if you work with the WMF staff when they do their surveys.
Also, I've been told that it is hard to do a retrospective assessment of an specific group of users edits. But if they are identified upfront it is doable. So, maybe you could work with WMF staff and have users attending outreach editing events to have their accounts identified for follow up of their contributions.
Sydney User:FloNight
Chris, (prepare for a babble fest on data)
This is data I'm actually currently gathering as a volunteer. I have a survey (that isn't perfect, and I wish I could have asked more..but..) I've developed and I use a tool to monitor project contributors ( http://toolserver.org/~dispenser/cgi-bin/useractivity.py?page=Wikipedia:Wiki...). I also have been in personal contact with over 200 female editors over the past week. My email box is a little overflowing...of painful stories and lack of interest in continuing to contribute - flipped with people who are interested in contributing again because of the email I sent them or like to share their own ideas on women and retention with me.
The problem is that most women don't identify their gender on their account, but I'm finding a surprisingly large amount actually identify it on their userpage (i.e. with a userbox or their name).
Regarding outreach, I have kept tabs on our local outreach and I do follow up on talk pages, use that tool above I showed you (that Dispenser made) to check out project productivity (i.e. you'll see with WP:Public Art, which I co-founded - many of the users were assigned the project for school and most have never edited again after their school assignment, and the majority are female (this is based on userpage data etc). I've also seen with another female-themed outreach event that out of about 10 only ONE female editor still contributes since the day of the event, which was months ago.
I'm babbling here, but, I'm obsessed with this data, and someplace in my mind I think it'll all help myself/WMF/whoever better explore how to close the gender gap.
On another note - I'm hoping to present the data from my Women and Wikimedia survey at the end of October with a presentation (hopefully at WMF, but they don't know that yet...).
-Sarah
On Sat, Oct 1, 2011 at 6:41 AM, Chris Keating chriskeatingwiki@gmail.comwrote:
So how can we measure what impact we're having on getting women to participate?
Over the next few months Wikimedia UK's very going to be adopting a rather more formal set of reporting procedures. I just wondered if people on this list had any thoughts about how we could build in some gender impact assessment into this reporting.
It should be fairly easy for the Board to ask for statistics on how many of the people attending events are men and how many are women. Ideally we would also have statistics on how many people attending events *who then go on to edit/join/otherwise take part* available by gender. It should be even easier to monitor the diversity of our staff (currently we have 2, both are male) and Wikimedians in Residence (also currently 2, both male) and indeed the board (err.... 7 men) - hopefully these statistics will be a bit better in a year's time.
Does anyone have any more thoughts on how we should approach this?
Regards,
Chris
PS. Also, you might be interested to know that we've identified a £10k budget for "broadening impact" - i.e. additional funding for projects which are aimed at women, Scotland, Wales, ethnic or linguistic minorities - I think this is a good thing but we do need to make sure the remaining £500k isn't spent only on white Englishmen ;-)
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