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(a)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/
_______________________________________________
Strategy mailing list
Strategy(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/strategy
--
Netha Hussain
Institute of Neuroscience and Physiology
University of Gothenburg, Sweden