Hi Tomasz,


I will not be surprised if the same holds true for strategy discussions in other languages and projects. In Malayalam language Wikipedia, the only woman participant in Cycle 1 was me (and I happened to be the discussion coordinator as well).Not only that women do not take part in aggressive discussions, they also are less likely to participate in Wikimedia surveys [1]. I am speculating the reasons for the low participation of women in Strategy discussions :

1. It is not actual conflict that keeps women away, but the perception that conflict could happen. One could hypothesize that women do not follow the link to the strategy discussion page assuming that there could be potential conflict/harassment.

2. Women edit Wikipedia for reasons like collaborating and sharing, while men edit for 'leaving their mark' on the community [2]. The motivation for participating in strategy discussion is more aligned to the end goal of men than women. 

3. Women perceive less confidence than men on editing Wikipedia [3-6]. To participate in Strategy discussion, one has to move out of one's niche topics and speak up about something that they are not 100% sure of, which might lower one's confidence substantially.

The sad outcome of this phenomenon is that women's perspectives are not adequately represented in Strategy discussion. Also, if you are a woman talking about strategy, you will end up talking about a strategy for bringing more women into Wikimedia [7]. 


[1] http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0065782
[2] http://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/ICWSM/ICWSM16/paper/download/13192/12879 
[3] Helgeson, 2014, (sv-wiki)
[4] Hinnosaar,(2015), US population
[5] Collin,Bear et al (2012), en-wiki
[6] Protonotarios et al (2015), gr-wiki
[7] http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Unicorn_Law


When I think of gender, I also see the human sexuality spectrum, but sadly, most of all research about participation on Wikimedia is around gender binary.


On 16 July 2017 at 13:55, Tomasz Ganicz <polimerek@gmail.com> wrote:
I just realized that for some reasons - at least in Polish Wikipedia we have really low number of female users participating in discussions:

Statics are like that:

Cycle 3: 0 of 19 (at the moment)
Cycle 2: 1 of 26
Cycle 1: 2 of 35

So,  there are: 3 woman out of 80 participants - which is just 3,75% of participants, although we have around 23% of active users who declared to be females  in Polish Wikipedia.

I know about the phenomenon that in general female users avoid aggressive meta-discussions, but actually - the strategy on-line discussions weren't very aggressive in Polish Wikipedia. In the same time there were some other more aggressive discussions, which were attended by female user in higher number than 3.75%. I am curious how it looks like in other on-line strategy discussions?


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--
Netha Hussain
Institute of Neuroscience and Physiology
University of Gothenburg, Sweden