Moving forward - Gendergap

2 Dec 2014

In reply to Kerry Raymond's post...

QUANTIFICATION

If "all the studies on female participation come up with low percentages
around 10%" but there are anecdotes of a significant undercount from
Teahouse volunteers and such and if female participation at Wikimania
approaches one-third, would that not seem to fortify my point that there is
a need for reexamination of the magnitude of the gender gap? What is the
exact magnitude of the female undercount (or the male overcount)?

This does not even bring up the matter of dynamics — is the gender
disparity changing over time, and if so, which direction is it moving?

There is only one way to find this out: study, study, study, survey,
survey, survey...

That WMF has its own editor gender data from 2012 that it is not releasing,
as has been intimated, is annoying. Still: why is the GGTF waiting for San
Francisco at all? Why is quantification and surveying not a vital part of
the task force's mission?

That there is an editorial gender gap is beyond dispute. But how big is it
really and how is it changing over time?

PROACTIVE RECRUITMENT AND RETENTION

So if edit-a-thons don't work, as you indicate, why is the WMF still
spending money on them? Is it mere symbolism?

I have noted from working with a college class at WP that short-term class
assignments don't seem to create long-term Wikipedians. Students being
students, they slam out the minimum required right before deadline and move
along with their lives. I don't know what does create long-term content
people, other than a passion about SOMETHING and a desire to share the
information. Vandal fighters and quality control people may have a
different motivation.

Let's assume for the sake of the discussion that there is NOTHING that can
be done proactively to pick the needles out of the haystack — that it is
impossible for any bureaucratic entity to identify and activate the small
fraction of 1% of people that will eventually become long-term Wikipedia
volunteers.

This would mean that the "needles" are going to self-identify by
registering at WP and beginning work under their own volition. Therefore,
logically, primary attention should be focused on identifying and
cultivating "new editors" every day, nurturing the newbies as they start to
navigate the technical and cultural learning curves. In which case, Ms.
Stierch's "Teahouse" concept is 100% right on the money.

And that's where the gender gap can be addressed, by making sure that every
effort is made to teach and acclimate female newcomers in particular.

As for edit-a-thons and outreach recruiting, I personally believe that any
recruitment that is not focused on teachers and academics will probably not
produce lasting results. I'm also pretty well convinced that long term
Wikipedians are made one at a time.

Tim Davenport
"Carrite" on WP
Corvallis, OR

=========

Kerry Raymond wrote:

A.	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
womens 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. It would be interesting to see how the male/female numbers
break down across the various types of attendees, e.g. WMF staff, Chapter
members, event organisers, etc. My suspicion is that women are in higher
proportion among staffers, chapters, etc and this skews the Wikimania
participation. I dont know how scholarships are awarded and whether women
are at any advantage in that process.

B.	A very interesting research
paperhttp://files.grouplens.org/papers/wp-gender-wikisym2011.pdf shows
that women
are less likely to survive the newbie stage than men. But, perhaps contrary
to what many expected, their data does not suggest that women are more
easily discouraged by being reverted (they show men and womens survival
rates in the face of reversion are similar) but that more womens edits are
reverted than mens edits and this is the cause of higher attrition among
women. This has caused me to wonder if women as newbies are more attracted
to articles where the risk of reversion is higher perhaps because there are
more policies to be considered (e.g. biographies of living people, noting
that women are predominantly the purchasers of celebrity magazines which
deal mostly in content related to living people). The paper does show that
men and women edit in different areas (men are more likely to edit in
geography and science for example) but the analysis is too high level to
answer my question. The other inherent limitation in any study of newbies
that there is nothing in the initial signup to Wikipedia that asks you about
your gender (even optionally) so very few newbies are self-identifying as
either male or female at that time. So, its actually very hard to study the
non-surviving female newbies because you cant find them. This often means
our study of the experiences of newbies is based heavily on those who are
still around later to be studied or surveyed which introduces survivor bias
into the study. So this may be a consideration in relation to the findings
of this paper. Interview studies keep pointing to women not liking the
abrasive environment of Wikipedia. Civility is a part of that issue.
Although I think its not so much about the use of specific words, but
rather a general culture of aggression. The people who use the swear words
are simply much easier to spot and hold up as examples of the broader
problem than those who engage in equally aggressive behaviour but do so
citing [[WP:Policy]] and use the undo-button.

C.	In relation to pro-active recruitment, I do a lot of that here in
Australia, edit training and edit-a-thons. While some of the edit-a-thons
have targeted women participants and are therefore predominantly women, edit
training events are generally not so targeted and attract both women and
men. From all of that I believe that women are not inherently disinterested
in contributing to Wikipedia. However, these events do not seem to create
ongoing 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 the
world. Generally, the one-event approach to edit training isnt sufficient.
Greater success seems to come from regular events usually in a
university/college setting, but regular events are a challenge to resource
with volunteers (we have other things that have to be done in our lives).
Interestingly, most of the people who currently attend our sessions are
middle aged and older. Many struggle with the markup; I hope the visual
editor will address some of that problem. So I think we need to look at
diversity in terms of age as well as gender. But I dont think outreach is
really the answer because it cannot be done at the necessary scale. Its not
that we need to have a team of mentors, we need everyone to be willing to
help 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 outreach
events as well as soon afterwards. Their edits are reverted (for what seems
to me to be no justifiable reason), new articles being speedily deleted or
splashed with messages about policies they dont know about and dont
comprehend, or left in an eternal limbo of rejection in Article for
Creation. These folks are all good faith and they are all newcomers but
the policies of assume good faith and dont bite the newbies are
completely ignored. We have many editors who are very aggressive. I have no
idea if they are just angry with the world as a whole, or actually enjoy
bullying the newbies. While obviously there are benefits to a culture of
mentoring, even when I am in hand-holding edit-training mode (about as
mentoring as it gets and I provide my contact details off-wiki as well as
on-wiki for any follow-up), its difficult for me to justify to them why the
newbies 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 pool
of editors creating these problems where maybe one could try to take action
against them. It seems that we have such a huge pool of aggressive editors
that our newbies will randomly attract the attention of one of them. (Or it
may be that some bullying personalities are actively on the lookout for
victims and newbies are a soft target).

So, all in all, I think if we need to go back to first principles the
encyclopaedia anyone can edit and see that the aggressive nature of the
community is working against this intention and seek to curb that
aggression. I think curbing the aggression would result in more editors both
male and female. So in that light, I would have to say that I find the
ArbCom decision distressing as it appears to acknowledge and reinforce that
the aggressive culture is both dominant and should continue to be so.

Kerry