Jason,

Thanks for this thoughtful analysis. I think you've done an excellent job laying out your reasoning. 

Unfortunately, as you know well, any analysis of the gender gap and the retention of women editors necessarily involves a lot of estimates and extrapolations. 

Some of that is unavoidable without conducting a new full-scale research project (such as getting an accurate, up-to-date % of women editors to replace old estimates from previous studies). But other estimates can probably be replaced with fresh data at reasonable cost, and could refine your projections. 

For example, it shouldn't be too difficult to generate new editor retention numbers, like those from the editor trends study, with publicly available data. It's possible that we're retaining active editors at a different rate than we were in 2009. We're certainly retaining new editors at a lower rate than we were back then. 

Overall, I agree that radical action is probably necessary if we want to see substantial increases in women editing. The outcome of several Inspire grants might help inform those actions: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab/Survey_women_who_don%27t_contribute

Thanks again for sharing! Please keep us posted,
Jonathan

On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 5:09 PM, Jason Radford <jsradford@uchicago.edu> wrote:
Hi,

Since participating in the Inspire campaign, I got interested in the question of exactly how many women would be needed on Wikipedia to close the gender gap.  I ran some simulations and came up with some fairly radical numbers.  For example, according to my calculations, there are so few current and new female editors that, even if every current and new active, female editor stayed active for ten years, we wouldn't close the gap.

I've posted the results to my blog. It's password protected so I can share the results and get feedback without making it pubic.  You can access them by using the password "wikipedia". I'm hoping some of you with experience researching gender representation on Wikipedia would be able to catch any errors.

Thanks!
Jason
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Jason Radford
Doctoral Student, Sociology, University of Chicago
Visiting Researcher, Lazer Lab, Northeastern University
Connect: LinkedIn, Twitter, University of Chicago
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Jonathan T. Morgan
Senior Design Researcher
Wikimedia Foundation