Begin forwarded message:

From: aaron shaw <aaronshaw@northwestern.edu>

Date: Fri, 17 Jan 2014 08:52:02 -0600
Subject: Upcoming talk at the Berkman Center on the gender gap and Internet use skills

I wanted to pass along the details of an upcoming talk that Eszter Hargittai and I will be doing at the Berkman Center on Tuesday 1/21. We will present preliminary findings of work-in-progress on the relationship between the Wikipedia gender gap and people's internet skills. You can stream the talk online or attend in-person (if you happen to be in the Boston area). More details and an RSVP form are available on the Berkman Center website: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/luncheon/2014/01/hargittai-shaw

All the best,

Aaron

[January 21] Internet Skills and Wikipedia's Gender Inequality

with Eszter Hargittai and Aaron Shaw, Northwestern University

January 21, 2014 at 12:30pm ET
Berkman Center for Internet & Society, 23 Everett St, 2nd Floor
RSVP required for those attending in person via the form
This event will be webcast live (on this page) at 12:30pm ET.

Although women are just as likely as men to read Wikipedia, they only represent an estimated 16% of global Wikipedia editors and 23% of U.S. adult Wikipedia editors. Previous research has focused on analyzing aspects of current contributors and aspects of the existing Wikipedia community to explain this gender gap in contributions. Instead, we analyze data about both Wikipedia contributors and non-contributors. We also focus on a previously ignored factor: people’s Internet skills. Our data set includes a diverse group of American young adults with detailed information about their background attributes, Internet experiences and skills. We find that the gender gap in editing is exacerbated by a similarly important Internet skills gap. By far the most likely people to contribute to Wikipedia are males with high Internet skills. Our findings suggest that efforts to overcome the gender gap in Wikipedia contributions must address the Web-use skills gap. Future research needs to look at why high-skilled women do not contribute at comparable rates to highly-skilled men.

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