On Thu, Mar 5, 2015 at 4:11 PM, Tilman Bayer tbayer@wikimedia.org wrote:
Yes, but as I wrote in that Signpost article, that data relied on the gender editors state in their user preferences and "this information is optional and the majority of accounts do not state it". There a good reasons to assume that the differing incentives distort that data even more than the anonymous responses to banner-advertised surveys. For example, the user has to be comfortable with stating their gender in public, and in several languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_neutrality_in_languages_with_grammatical_gender female users have to set that user preference if they want the word "user" next to their nick show up in female instead of male grammatical gender form (e.g. "Benutzerin" vs. "Benutzer" in German) - male users do not have that incentive.
One change that could address the latter incentive is to change the defaults on MediaWiki so that masculine grammatical gender is not the default for new users. It could be randomly assigned, and then some men as well as some women would have the incentive to set their gender preferences.
-Frances