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?
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?
-- Tomek "Polimerek" Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/
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