On 21 February 2011 17:49, James Heilman jmh649@gmail.com wrote:
We have heard a great deal lately about a "gender gap". Is there really a gender gap? With 93% of editor not marking there gender known per http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2011-02-14/News_an... http://refmight it just be that female editors prefer to keep there gender unknown which seems like an equally valid explanation of the results.
It's fair to say that any figures we get are rendered pretty dubious by the privacy/nondisclosure issue, and it's certainly true to say that there are going to be observable and predictable biases as a result, but I don't think this effect is going to be strong enough to entirely explain away the figures.
The various calculations and surveys on the demographics of the editing community are probably wildly inaccurate in many details, but with the figure widely quoted of about 10-15% of editors being female ... well, most people seem to have nodded and said "yes, that seems about right". It's not widely dissimilar to earlier estimates, and it fits with a lot of anecdotal observations of (and from!) the community over time.