Hello everyone! please excuse the english. oona told me this discussion was happening, so I thought I would pass along the notes I sent around to my team about the webinar as well: Unlike past research projects which Jonas referenced, the point of this research was to look beyond the problems internally to WIkipedia -- i.e., why women might be leaving -- and instead focus on whether or not women are even coming to WIkipedia to begin with. They studied lots of variables, but interestingly, the only things that were statistically significant in predicting if someone would be a Wikipedia contributor or not were *Gender, Internet Skills*, or if they had a required student assignment. Note that this research was done on young adults in the United States only. Main takeaways: - *Gender matters, and even more so among high-skilled users* (i.e., the higher the internet skills, the BIGGER the gap between Wikipedia contributions for women and men) - *Internet skills matter,* people with low skills don’t contribute to WIkipedia regardless of gender - *Internet skills have long-term effects* (2009 skills predict behavior in 2012!) - Other factors do not seem to matter, including: - Race/ethnicity - socioeconomic status - various Internet experience - confidence in editing Wikipedia Someone at the end of the presentation asked the question, "So, if you were the Wikimedia Foundation, what would you do?" Unfortunately, not a lot of ideas came up, but they did say that focused interventions like bringing in classroom assignments helps, but otherwise the focus should be on lowering barriers to entry so that it doesn't always bias towards high-skill level individuals (which also biases towards men, who are then even more likely than women to edit). I would be interested in hearing more ideas around this. Thanks to all and hope you are all well! Jessie 2014/1/21 Raylton P. Sousa &lt;raylton.sousa(a)gmail.com&gt; -- *Jessie WildGrantmaking Learning & Evaluation * *Wikimedia Foundation* Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. Help us make it a reality! Donate to Wikimedia <https://donate.wikimedia.org/>