Thanks for that, Kevin! It’s all interesting.
It is interesting that male and female Wikipedians have similar education levels and I wonder if that is what we would expect based on the broader societies from which we draw Wikipedians.
The 2011 survey showed that the level of education of Wikipedians was 61% with at least a bachelor’s degree, which is of course massively higher compared to the broader society from which we draw Wikipedians.
For example, in Australia in 2011 (we had a census that year) 18% (of those over 15 years of age) had at least a bachelor’s degree. For Australia, 55% of those with a degree or higher are female compared to 45% male. Aside. If you are wondering where all the men went, the answer is vocational education which covers all the trades like plumbing, electrical etc, where there are relatively few women who are mostly doing hairdressing and beautician courses (all of which are very gendered occupations in Australia). So finding that the education levels of male and female Wikipedians are similar seems plausible. From doing Wikipedia edit training, the folks without the degrees don’t grasp the importance of citations and so are unlikely to succeed as Wikipedians, so I find the 61% with at least a bachelor’s degree seems to correlate with “willing/able to cite”, which links to the editor decline seen since 2006 when the expectation of citations came into Wikipedia.
Is it significant that female Wikipedians are slightly older than the males on average? Well, in many Western societies, women have longer life expectancies than men, so the age of the average women probably should be slightly older than the average man. Of course, in poorer societies, women often have a lower life expectancy but the education levels suggest that Wikipedians are probably not drawn from the poorest people in the poorest countries, as in most societies education levels tend to be positively correlated with income, health, etc. So although statistically significant, I don’t think it’s telling us anything remarkable.
Reported self-performance data is probably consistent with women being reported as self-deprecating in other studies.
All in all, it seems the female Wikipedians are more-or-less what you would expect them to be relative to male Wikipedians, but doesn’t give us much insight into why there are so few of them.
Kerry
From: Wiki-research-l [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Kevin G Crowston
Sent: Sunday, 21 February 2016 9:31 PM
To: wiki-research-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org; wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] Gender bias in GitHub (but not entirely what you expect)
Coincidentally, I have the 2011 survey data open in my stats package. I can report that there is not a statistically significant difference in reported level of education between those who report being male or female but the average age reported by women is 33.4 and by men, 31.9, and that difference is statistically significant.
Looking through the other variables, the few others that I checked (e.g., children) were not significantly different statistically, with the exception of self-reported performance: men averaged 6.25 (on a 1-10 scale, not at all good to extremely good) while women averaged 6.0, and the difference is statistically significant. You may make of that what you will :-)
If you are curious about any of the other items on the survey, I’d be happy to check them.
Kevin Crowston | Distinguished Professor of Information Science | School of Information Studies
Syracuse University
348 Hinds Hall
Syracuse, New York 13244
t (315) 443.1676 f 315.443.5806 e crowston@syr.edu
From: "Kerry Raymond" <kerry.raymond@gmail.com>
To: "'Research into Wikimedia content and communities’" <wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] Gender bias in GitHub (but not entirely what you expect)
So I can easily believe the average women on GitHub is of a higher standard of ability than the average male. I suspect the same holds true about Wikipedians. Does anyone actually have the 2011 editor survey data to compare male vs female on other questions like age, level of education, etc. It would be interesting to know how the male and female Wikipedians of 2011 are statistically different in other ways.