Dear colleagues,
I hope someone with survey design experience will be at this event and collect data on how many mothers manage to attend this event. We need to know whether women have adult or young children, and whether they are single parents, their ethnicity, and professional training. This will provide truly useful data, if done scientifically. I can help write an instrument if called upon to do so. Let us not overlook single parent fathers and alternative parents. My hypothesis is that there will be extremely few of any of these. Dads (in some ethnicities) get a social 'bonus' for being parents (increased social status), unlike mothers, so its important to distinguish clearly who is supporting and raising children, not just having parented and kids exist in the world kinds of data.
KSRolph
Good question. I wonder if this sort of survey has been done more generally for conferences? I would imagine all the factors mentioned here would apply to conference attendance generally, not specific to Wikimania. Which might speak to how effective we could reasonably expect conferences to be in addressing the gender gap.
-Pete
On Jul 5, 2012, at 8:18 AM, Karen Sue Rolph wrote:
Dear colleagues,
I hope someone with survey design experience will be at this event and collect data on how many mothers manage to attend this event. We need to know whether women have adult or young children, and whether they are single parents, their ethnicity, and professional training. This will provide truly useful data, if done scientifically. I can help write an instrument if called upon to do so. Let us not overlook single parent fathers and alternative parents. My hypothesis is that there will be extremely few of any of these. Dads (in some ethnicities) get a social 'bonus' for being parents (increased social status), unlike mothers, so its important to distinguish clearly who is supporting and raising children, not just having parented and kids exist in the world kinds of data.
KSRolph _______________________________________________ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Pete Forsyth peteforsyth@gmail.com 503-383-9454 mobile
On Thu, Jul 5, 2012 at 11:18 AM, Karen Sue Rolph karenrolph@hotmail.com wrote:
Dear colleagues,
I hope someone with survey design experience will be at this event and collect data on how many mothers manage to attend this event. We need to know whether women have adult or young children, and whether they are single parents, their ethnicity, and professional training. This will provide truly useful data, if done scientifically. I can help write an instrument if called upon to do so. Let us not overlook single parent fathers and alternative parents. My hypothesis is that there will be extremely few of any of these. Dads (in some ethnicities) get a social 'bonus' for being parents (increased social status), unlike mothers, so its important to distinguish clearly who is supporting and raising children, not just having parented and kids exist in the world kinds of data.
FYI, every event for women in open technology and culture that I have attended where we asked for this information had a very low rate of women who were parents - around 5%. At the Ada Initiative, we believe we must include women with children in our mission. Since one of our co-founders has a small child, we are aware of at least some of the challenges involved in having children and participating in open technology and culture.
This is one of the reasons that the Ada Initiative is providing free childcare to AdaCamp attendees, although we only had one person apply in time for the deadline to register for childcare. We plan to advertise it better in the future. Childcare has turned out to be fairly easy to provide, and we hope to be able to help other conferences provide childcare in the future.
-VAL