[Foundation-l] encouraging women's participation

[phoebe ayers]

On Thu, Jun 17, 2010 at 10:00 PM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 17, 2010 at 11:08 PM, Ryan Kaldari <rkaldari at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>> I don't think scapegoating Wikipedia's gender imbalances to biological
>> differences is especially helpful. And the suggestion that it may not be
>> possible to dumb-down Wikipedia enough to attract women is ridiculous
>> (and offensive). Regardless of our genetic predispositions, there are
>> very real cultural issues that frequently drive female contributors away
>> from Wikimedia projects.
> [snip]
>
> Ryan,
>
> I believe your post was unnecessarily confrontational.  I would expect
> you to call me out on that kind of thing, so I'm going to call you out
> on it.

If it makes any difference, I think you're both right in part -- Ryan
is of course correct that there are there are cultural issues on the
projects and these may result in real, immediate barriers for specific
people who try to edit[1]. I have no idea if Greg is right about this
genetic differences theory -- I don't have the math or the biology
cred to evaluate such a claim, but do know this is a deeply
controversial area[2] -- but your (hopefully larger) point seems
un-controversial enough, that making things easier for people who
haven't self-selected as editors already, with whatever concentration
of traits skewed from the general population such self-selection may
produce, will result in a more diverse editorial body in general. And
I think we all hope that a more diverse editorial body will lead to a
better site culture and less systemic bias in articles (this is of
course open to argument, though).

These two things are not mutually exclusive, however. My point was
that stereotyping too much about women (via genetic differences, or
assuming that all countries are just like the U.S.) is bad for
outreach; but not stereotyping at all -- not recognizing that there
are techniques we could use to outreach to underrepresented groups,
perhaps learning from other outreach done by other organizations with
similar goals -- would be unfortunate too.

There's another good conversation about this topic going on here:
http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Strategic_Plan/Movement_Priorities#diversity_4675

-- phoebe


[1] or even talk about it; as Greg says there are plenty of people I
know and respect who have strong views on this topic who won't write
about them, because they'll get shot down. I had to think about it for
a while myself.
[2]. controversial enough that it's gotten a lot of people in trouble
scientifically and socially, including the president of Harvard, whom
you cite in your other piece; honestly, you should also probably
expect serious debate if you go there. Two nice summaries:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Summers#Differences_between_the_sexes,
http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2005/01/17/summers_remarks_on_women_draw_fire/