But if they don't find it, they just wouldn't select it, right? Or was your image suggesting it defaults to "he" unless they change it?

I'm not actually looking to look at the balance for all user accounts but am looking to identify the women in a particular cohort to see what content they are adding. So even having some who don't identify would be ok, so long as I could get a better data set from those who do actually make the choice.

I understand if that can't be made a priority, though, because, globally, there are languages that don't have a grammatical gender. Is there any other way to pull that data publicly?

(My cohorts are quite large, and surveys rarely get enough responses to give me very good data).

On Mon, Jul 7, 2014 at 3:38 PM, Steven Walling <swalling@wikimedia.org> wrote:

On Mon, Jul 7, 2014 at 2:38 PM, Jami Mathewson <jami@wikiedu.org> wrote:

I mentioned to Dan a while back that I would find it super useful if gender (for those who self-identify on their user accounts) were incorporated into the cohort information on Wikimetrics

Hi Jami,

Do you mean the gender specified in a user's preferences?

Especially with the current design,[1] I would encourage us not to rely on this preference as an accurate representation of the gender distribution of Wikimedia accounts.

The purpose of this preference is for software localization, not developing a profile of users. Consider that users have to wade through Preferences in order to find this, and there is little incentive for them to fuss with it if their language doesn't have a grammatical gender. It's not likely to be reliable data on the topic. Tighe's approach is probably much more accurate, especially when dealing with new editors.

1. Screenshot https://i.imgur.com/NsoZJeL.png

--

Steven Walling,

Product Manager
https://wikimediafoundation.org/

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Jami Mathewson

Program Manager

Wiki Education Foundation

Our organization supports the Wikipedia Education Program in the United States and Canada.