There is a new blog post up on Wikipedia-criticism site Wikipediocracy that should be of interest to this list.
Andreas Kolbe with Nathalie Collida, "Why Women Have No Time For Wikipedia: Thoughts on the Online Encyclopedia's Gender Imbalance."
http://wikipediocracy.com/2014/08/26/why-women-have-no-time-for-wikipedia/
One interesting assertion made by the authors in their lengthy essay is that fewer than 1 in 50 WP contributors is a mother:
"It is sometimes argued that women simply have less time to contribute to Wikipedia, due to family commitments. This is a fallacy. Firstly, the United Nations University survey found https://web.archive.org/web/20130821015449/http:/www.wikipediasurvey.org/docs/Wikipedia_Overview_15March2010-FINAL.pdf#page=8 that only 33.29% of respondents had a partner, and only 14.72% had children. The difference between readers and contributors was negligible here, and the survey report did not indicate any difference in these percentages for male and female respondents. It is patently obvious that girls and women in the age groups that are most strongly represented in Wikipedia’s demographics typically do not yet have families of their own. Their lack of participation is unrelated to their being bogged down by family responsibilities.
"Of course, these figures also tell us something else: if only 14.72% of contributors have children, and the percentage of female contributors lies somewhere between 8.5% and 12.64%, then it looks like only 1.25%–1.86% of Wikipedia contributors are mothers.
"That is less than 1 in 50."
Tim Davenport "Carrite" on WP /// "Randy from Boise" on WPO
The math behind that little statistic was so terrible I had to write a blog post about it.
http://blog.mvolz.com/2014/08/what-percentage-of-wikipedia-editors-are-mums/
First off, in their blog post, Andreas & Collida multiply the percentage of contributor respondents who were women (12.64%) by the percentage of all respondents (contributor and reader, male and female) who were parents- 14.72%- while seemingly missing that the study in fact provided a breakdown of this: 13.7% of all female respondents were parents. (15.1% of the male respondents were).
Secondly, Andreas & Collida cherry pick a lower bound number for women contributors (8.5%) (source unkown) and presented the number from the survey (12.64%) as an upper bound. A literature search gave me an upper bound of 16.1% from Hill & Shaw.
Furthermore, the source Andreas & Collida used contained biased statistics. The original WMF/UNU-MERIT report had no methods section and didn’t control for sampling bias. The Hill & Shaw paper controls for sample bias based on a survey by Pew, which used better sampling methods.
Hill & Shaw tried to control for the survey’s selection bias and found that they “estimate that females, married people, and individuals with children were underrepresented in the WMF/UNU-MERIT sample while immigrants and students were overrepresented.”
This means that the two statistics Andreas & Collida chose to multiply together; female editors/contributors and males and females with children- were *both* underestimates in the WMF/UNU-MERIT survey.
Hill & Shaw provide the adjusted numbers for these accordingly; they estimate that 16.1% of contributors (as opposed to 12.64%) are female, and that 25.3% have children. We can perform a similar analysis as Andreas & Collida using those adjusted numbers by multiplying them, a result of about 4.1%- more than double their highest estimate.
Of course, this number is also flawed; we don’t have the actual breakdown of what percentage of female contributors have children, and instead are multiplying aggregate numbers. A better estimate could be obtained by redoing Hill & Shaw‘s analysis on the raw dataset.
On Tue, Aug 26, 2014 at 9:14 PM, Tim Davenport shoehutch@gmail.com wrote:
There is a new blog post up on Wikipedia-criticism site Wikipediocracy that should be of interest to this list.
Andreas Kolbe with Nathalie Collida, "Why Women Have No Time For Wikipedia: Thoughts on the Online Encyclopedia's Gender Imbalance."
http://wikipediocracy.com/2014/08/26/why-women-have-no-time-for-wikipedia/
One interesting assertion made by the authors in their lengthy essay is that fewer than 1 in 50 WP contributors is a mother:
"It is sometimes argued that women simply have less time to contribute to Wikipedia, due to family commitments. This is a fallacy. Firstly, the United Nations University survey found that only 33.29% of respondents had a partner, and only 14.72% had children. The difference between readers and contributors was negligible here, and the survey report did not indicate any difference in these percentages for male and female respondents. It is patently obvious that girls and women in the age groups that are most strongly represented in Wikipedia’s demographics typically do not yet have families of their own. Their lack of participation is unrelated to their being bogged down by family responsibilities.
"Of course, these figures also tell us something else: if only 14.72% of contributors have children, and the percentage of female contributors lies somewhere between 8.5% and 12.64%, then it looks like only 1.25%–1.86% of Wikipedia contributors are mothers.
"That is less than 1 in 50."
Tim Davenport "Carrite" on WP /// "Randy from Boise" on WPO
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Hi Marielle,
Thanks for your comments, and for pointing out that one of the more detailed reports from the UNU survey, i.e.
https://web.archive.org/web/20130129042156/http://www.wikipediasurvey.org/do...
did break down the number of contributors with children according to gender (I took my figures from the overview). I'll add a corresponding correction to our post later.
However, the figure given there, 13.7%, is not very different from the overall average of 14.72%. In fact, it is *lower*, and thus using the combined figure I would actually have slightly *overestimated* the percentage of mothers.
The source for the 8.5% figure is of course linked in the article. It is the Wikimedia Foundation's own April 2011 survey. The link is
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Editor_Survey_Report_-_...
The quote ("Our editing community continues to suffer from a lack of women editors. The survey provided an even starker view of this than previous studies (only 8.5% of editors are women).") was a verbatim from page 3 of the WMF report.
I will have to look into Hill & Shaw, but would note that the Wikimedia Foundation itself reported the figures from the UNU survey as they stood (see e.g. p. 8 of the February 2011 Strategic Plan: "According to the study, over 86% of contributors were male").
Best, Andreas
On Wed, Aug 27, 2014 at 4:52 PM, Marielle Volz marielle.volz@gmail.com wrote:
The math behind that little statistic was so terrible I had to write a blog post about it.
http://blog.mvolz.com/2014/08/what-percentage-of-wikipedia-editors-are-mums/
First off, in their blog post, Andreas & Collida multiply the percentage of contributor respondents who were women (12.64%) by the percentage of all respondents (contributor and reader, male and female) who were parents- 14.72%- while seemingly missing that the study in fact provided a breakdown of this: 13.7% of all female respondents were parents. (15.1% of the male respondents were).
Secondly, Andreas & Collida cherry pick a lower bound number for women contributors (8.5%) (source unkown) and presented the number from the survey (12.64%) as an upper bound. A literature search gave me an upper bound of 16.1% from Hill & Shaw.
Furthermore, the source Andreas & Collida used contained biased statistics. The original WMF/UNU-MERIT report had no methods section and didn’t control for sampling bias. The Hill & Shaw paper controls for sample bias based on a survey by Pew, which used better sampling methods.
Hill & Shaw tried to control for the survey’s selection bias and found that they “estimate that females, married people, and individuals with children were underrepresented in the WMF/UNU-MERIT sample while immigrants and students were overrepresented.”
This means that the two statistics Andreas & Collida chose to multiply together; female editors/contributors and males and females with children- were *both* underestimates in the WMF/UNU-MERIT survey.
Hill & Shaw provide the adjusted numbers for these accordingly; they estimate that 16.1% of contributors (as opposed to 12.64%) are female, and that 25.3% have children. We can perform a similar analysis as Andreas & Collida using those adjusted numbers by multiplying them, a result of about 4.1%- more than double their highest estimate.
Of course, this number is also flawed; we don’t have the actual breakdown of what percentage of female contributors have children, and instead are multiplying aggregate numbers. A better estimate could be obtained by redoing Hill & Shaw‘s analysis on the raw dataset.
On Tue, Aug 26, 2014 at 9:14 PM, Tim Davenport shoehutch@gmail.com wrote:
There is a new blog post up on Wikipedia-criticism site Wikipediocracy
that
should be of interest to this list.
Andreas Kolbe with Nathalie Collida, "Why Women Have No Time For
Wikipedia:
Thoughts on the Online Encyclopedia's Gender Imbalance."
http://wikipediocracy.com/2014/08/26/why-women-have-no-time-for-wikipedia/
One interesting assertion made by the authors in their lengthy essay is
that
fewer than 1 in 50 WP contributors is a mother:
"It is sometimes argued that women simply have less time to contribute to Wikipedia, due to family commitments. This is a fallacy. Firstly, the
United
Nations University survey found that only 33.29% of respondents had a partner, and only 14.72% had children. The difference between readers and contributors was negligible here, and the survey report did not indicate
any
difference in these percentages for male and female respondents. It is patently obvious that girls and women in the age groups that are most strongly represented in Wikipedia’s demographics typically do not yet
have
families of their own. Their lack of participation is unrelated to their being bogged down by family responsibilities.
"Of course, these figures also tell us something else: if only 14.72% of contributors have children, and the percentage of female contributors
lies
somewhere between 8.5% and 12.64%, then it looks like only 1.25%–1.86% of Wikipedia contributors are mothers.
"That is less than 1 in 50."
Tim Davenport "Carrite" on WP /// "Randy from Boise" on WPO
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
On Wed, Aug 27, 2014 at 12:22 PM, Andreas Kolbe jayen466@gmail.com wrote:
I will have to look into Hill & Shaw, but would note that the Wikimedia Foundation itself reported the figures from the UNU survey as they stood (see e.g. p. 8 of the February 2011 Strategic Plan: "According to the study, over 86% of contributors were male").
NB., that was before the Hill & Shaw paper was published, which was 2013 :) Hill & Shaw is *probably* the best estimate of the gendergap we have so far, but everyone -- including the WMF and the researchers involved -- knows that the data can be improved. And hopefully it will be, with future editor surveys and more research!
-- phoebe
Thanks for the response Andreas. I've updated with the 8.5% source.
I'm not selling Hill as a panacea either; there are actually lots of techniques to correct biased sampling and using another survey as a benchmark only works well if the demographic questions are the same or at least very closely matched. I haven't compared the Pew and UN surveys in detail but I'm sure it could be done better (that's pretty much how these things always go)!
One thing I didn't criticise you for yet (but will now!) is to dismiss the claim of family status's effect on contribution based on the data you provided.
I agree that the fact that even young women are very unrepresented means it likely doesn't account for a large portion of the gender gap. But your argument that the fact that the *bulk* of wikipedians are younger people means that family status isn't an issue is particularly erroneous, because it assumes that age demographics and family status are independent- which they are quite clearly not. It could be, for instance, that gender gap is smallest in the younger demographic *because* they don't have families yet, and the proportion of women drops with age because they drop out to have families. (Not an actual hypothesis I'm proposing, just an example of how assuming independance goes wrong fast.)
It's important to keep in mind that the actual reason for the gender gap is probably a large number of very small things and no particular one of these things likely accounts for a very large portion of the gap- if that's the case we'll need much better statistical power to detect them and more sophisticated analyses.
Anyway, thanks for writing this post- got us talking, and regardless of how the actual numbers kick up it's still pretty clear there aren't very many of us.
On Wed, Aug 27, 2014 at 8:42 PM, phoebe ayers phoebe.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
On Wed, Aug 27, 2014 at 12:22 PM, Andreas Kolbe jayen466@gmail.com wrote:
I will have to look into Hill & Shaw, but would note that the Wikimedia Foundation itself reported the figures from the UNU survey as they stood (see e.g. p. 8 of the February 2011 Strategic Plan: "According to the study, over 86% of contributors were male").
NB., that was before the Hill & Shaw paper was published, which was 2013 :) Hill & Shaw is *probably* the best estimate of the gendergap we have so far, but everyone -- including the WMF and the researchers involved -- knows that the data can be improved. And hopefully it will be, with future editor surveys and more research!
-- phoebe
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Hi Marielle,
The supplementary report you pointed me to (thanks again) actually has data comparing the proportions of female readers and female contributors in the various age cohorts: it's Figure 5 on page 21.
https://web.archive.org/web/20130129042156/http://www.wikipediasurvey.org/do...
Looking at that graphic, the proportion of female contributors vs. female readers takes a dip in the 18-21 age group, but then *rises* for the 22-29 age group, and *rises again* for the 30-85 age group. This pattern, too, does not suggest a major influence of family obligations on female contributorship: the proportion of women contributors vs. women readers rises at the precise points in time where you would think mothers of families would have their hands fullest.
In fact, the pattern is not particularly dissimilar to the pattern observed for males, shown in the same graphic on the right.
Figures 1 and 2 on page 6, which represent figures for readers and contributors combined, are more likely to reflect such an effect (I agree that it will be there to at least some extent), because women's involvement overall, as readers *or* contributors, is highest for children and then drops up to age 30 – though at that point it then rises again.
But the main point I wanted to make was that the old adage "women are simply too busy to spend time online and edit Wikipedia" just doesn't hit the mark. Women *do* have time to spend online – they're just spending it elsewhere.
Facebook use among women for example balloons between 18 and 34 years of age, the precise time when female contributorship in Wikipedia drops:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Population_pyramid_of_Facebook_users...
It's similar for Pinterest, where around 80% of users female:
http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-pinterest-is-the-social-site...
(Note http://marketingland.com/report-92-percent-pinterest-pins-made-women-83394 which states that over 90 percent of pins are made by women, so women are not just numerically superior in terms of registered accounts, they are also far more active users.)
Pinterest and Reddit are symmetrically opposite poles in the graph shown here:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/20/social-media-by-gender-women-pinter...
Note that Wikipedia, if it were included in that graphic, would be an *even more extreme* outlier than Reddit, whichever of the various survey percentages available to us we were to use.
Now, just visualise what Reddit looks like and what Pinterest looks like. There's lots to think about here.
Best, Andreas
On Wed, Aug 27, 2014 at 9:18 PM, Marielle Volz marielle.volz@gmail.com wrote:
Thanks for the response Andreas. I've updated with the 8.5% source.
I'm not selling Hill as a panacea either; there are actually lots of techniques to correct biased sampling and using another survey as a benchmark only works well if the demographic questions are the same or at least very closely matched. I haven't compared the Pew and UN surveys in detail but I'm sure it could be done better (that's pretty much how these things always go)!
One thing I didn't criticise you for yet (but will now!) is to dismiss the claim of family status's effect on contribution based on the data you provided.
I agree that the fact that even young women are very unrepresented means it likely doesn't account for a large portion of the gender gap. But your argument that the fact that the *bulk* of wikipedians are younger people means that family status isn't an issue is particularly erroneous, because it assumes that age demographics and family status are independent- which they are quite clearly not. It could be, for instance, that gender gap is smallest in the younger demographic *because* they don't have families yet, and the proportion of women drops with age because they drop out to have families. (Not an actual hypothesis I'm proposing, just an example of how assuming independance goes wrong fast.)
It's important to keep in mind that the actual reason for the gender gap is probably a large number of very small things and no particular one of these things likely accounts for a very large portion of the gap- if that's the case we'll need much better statistical power to detect them and more sophisticated analyses.
Anyway, thanks for writing this post- got us talking, and regardless of how the actual numbers kick up it's still pretty clear there aren't very many of us.
On Wed, Aug 27, 2014 at 8:42 PM, phoebe ayers phoebe.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
On Wed, Aug 27, 2014 at 12:22 PM, Andreas Kolbe jayen466@gmail.com
wrote:
I will have to look into Hill & Shaw, but would note that the Wikimedia Foundation itself reported the figures from the UNU survey as they stood (see e.g. p. 8 of the February 2011 Strategic Plan: "According to the
study,
over 86% of contributors were male").
NB., that was before the Hill & Shaw paper was published, which was 2013
:)
Hill & Shaw is *probably* the best estimate of the gendergap we have so
far,
but everyone -- including the WMF and the researchers involved -- knows
that
the data can be improved. And hopefully it will be, with future editor surveys and more research!
-- phoebe
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Hi Marielle,
On Wed, Aug 27, 2014 at 9:18 PM, Marielle Volz marielle.volz@gmail.com wrote:
Thanks for the response Andreas. I've updated with the 8.5% source.
I have updated my text in line with your comments, and added an author's note acknowledging your input.
Best regards, Andreas
The post is currently on the Slashdot front page. There are over 300 comments to date, including a handful from current and former female Wikipedians (as well as much dross).
http://news.slashdot.org/story/14/08/28/207240/why-women-have-no-time-for-wi...
If you're prepared to wade through the discussion, elect to see all posts, including the downvoted ones, as otherwise you'll miss some of the more worthwhile ones.
On Thu, Aug 28, 2014 at 1:54 AM, Andreas Kolbe jayen466@gmail.com wrote:
Hi Marielle,
On Wed, Aug 27, 2014 at 9:18 PM, Marielle Volz marielle.volz@gmail.com wrote:
Thanks for the response Andreas. I've updated with the 8.5% source.
I have updated my text in line with your comments, and added an author's note acknowledging your input.
Best regards, Andreas
Thanks Phoebe. What actually happened to the April 2012 survey? I mentioned that the figures were never released – all I could find was some Wikimania 2013 slides John Vandenberg posted on Facebook, which did not include gender stats, and to my knowledge there was neither a report nor a dump (see links in the post; I noted that people kept asking about it on the relevant Meta talk page, and then it seemed to peter out).
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Wikipedia_Editor_Survey_2012#Result...
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_talk:Wikipedia_Editor_Survey_2012#H...
Do you have access to the gender demographics results, and if so, could you share them?
Best, Andreas
On Wed, Aug 27, 2014 at 8:42 PM, phoebe ayers phoebe.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
On Wed, Aug 27, 2014 at 12:22 PM, Andreas Kolbe jayen466@gmail.com wrote:
I will have to look into Hill & Shaw, but would note that the Wikimedia Foundation itself reported the figures from the UNU survey as they stood (see e.g. p. 8 of the February 2011 Strategic Plan: "According to the study, over 86% of contributors were male").
NB., that was before the Hill & Shaw paper was published, which was 2013 :) Hill & Shaw is *probably* the best estimate of the gendergap we have so far, but everyone -- including the WMF and the researchers involved -- knows that the data can be improved. And hopefully it will be, with future editor surveys and more research!
-- phoebe
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap