I did a little presentation on how WiRs who edit fill content gaps back in the 2022 WREN panel at Wikimania. You can see it here on YouTube.

One of the best sources for my research on content gaps was this taxonomy of knowledge gaps, done by WMF in 2019 (I found it via this tweet but I would love to find a blog post or something that summarizes it). I mentioned some of your editing in it! It includes information on the gender gap, both in content and in editorship. You can see my slides, which include sources in the notes to the slides, here.

Here are my notes from the slide on the gender gap about Wikipedia contributors. It looks like I didn’t document my sources on how Wikipedia distills bias from sources, but I can track those down if you are looking at bias in sources specifically:

Relevant quotes on the gender contributor gap:

“Or, for another example, consider Wikipedia. Although the exact gender demographics of Wikipedia contributors are unknown, numerous surveys have indicated that those who contribute content to the crowdsourced encyclopedia are between 84 percent and 91.5 percent men. Why? It could be that there, too, edits are less likely to be accepted if they come from women editors. It could also be attributed to Wikipedia’s exclusionary editing culture and technological infrastructure, as science and technology studies (STS) scholars Heather Ford and Judy Wajcman have argued. And there is also reason to go back to the housework argument. Dryden cites a 2011 study showing that women in twenty-nine countries spend more than twice as much time on household tasks than men do, even when controlling for women who hold full- time jobs.The study did not consider nonbinary genders or same-sex (or other non-hetero-typical) households. But even as a rough estimate, it seems that women simply don’t have as much time.” Source: Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein. Data Feminism. The MIT Press, 2020. Pg. 180

“The Wikipedian who is able to operate within the highly technical and legalistic framework of Wikipedia’s infrastructure performs particular kinds of authority that, in turn, involves exercising particular kinds of power. Once more, this is consequential for the possibility of being a female Wikipedian.” Source: Heather Ford and Judy Wajcman. “‘Anyone can edit’, not everyone does: Wikipedia’s infrastructure and the gender gap.” “‘Anyone can edit’, not everyone does: Wikipedia’s infrastructure and the gender gap.” Social Studies of Science Journal. 2017. P.521

“Wikipedia is held up as the collaborative utopia: a world model of free, decentralized participatory democracy. Yet underneath this idealized image, an obdurate gender divide remains: the overwhelming majority of contributors are male. Those studying the issue have made important contributions to understanding this problem by examining the reasons for this inequity, including women’s lack of technical skills and confidence, and female editors’ experience of the adversarial culture of the Wikipedia community. Importantly, there have been several projects aimed at including more women and rectifying the male-oriented content. Too often, however, the gender problem is still framed as a deficit in women.”
Source: Heather Ford and Judy Wajcman. “‘Anyone can edit’, not everyone does: Wikipedia’s infrastructure and the gender gap.” Social Studies of Science Journal. 2017. P.522

“If women who adhere to the underlying mission and epistemology of Wikipedia must engage in forms of deep and surface acting to participate as editors, administrators, and WMF employees, then what does it cost other individuals to conform to the Wiki way [25]? Should emotional labor be considered the cost of enabling such a socially complex project?“ Source: Amanda Menking and Ingrid Erickson. “The Heart Work of Wikipedia: Gendered, Emotional Labor in the World’s Largest Online Encyclopedia.”CHI '15: Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. P. 209  https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2702123.2702514

-Rachel Helps

From: Mary Mark Ockerbloom <celebration.women@gmail.com>
Sent: Wednesday, May 15, 2024 7:22 AM
To: Wikimedians in Residence Exchange Network <wren@lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: [Wren] Favorite gender gap recommendation?

There's a lot about the gender gap, in terms of Wikipedia projects, published research, and initiatives. 

What resource (on wiki or not) do you think gives the best  overview / summary / introduction to the gender gap on Wikipedia? What is the best source you know of, that could give someone a solid orientation on the issue?

Thanks for all the feedback; it's super helpful, especially when resources get mentioned that I didn't have on my radar.

Mary Mark Ockerbloom