[Gendergap] Research into causes of the gender gap?

[Bjoern Hoehrmann]

* Johannes Rohr wrote:
>I recently joined this list as I am one of the persons in charge of
>the community-oriented goals which Wikimedia Deutschland has set for
>itself for the coming year, one of which is to increase female
>participation in Wikimedia activities & projects by 50% until the end
>of 2012, I am well aware that this is a very ambitious target, and I
>feel that in order to maximise the chances of meeting it, we will have
>to be as clear as we can about what are the main deterrents,
>preventing Wikimedia from developing the same way as the rest of the
>Internet in terms of narrowing the Gender gap. What is it that makes
>Wikipedia so different, that the seemingly natural disappearance of
>the gender gap which we have seen in the Blogosphere and in social
>media, seems to completely pass by the Wikiverse?

You are comparing a global project to build an encyclopedia with media
for self-expression and communication. There are gender gaps in other
areas. Lego for instance, where you build things from little bricks, in
computing where people build information systems, in architecture where
people build buildings, in civil engineering where people build bridges
and dams, in construction, in production, where you also build things,
and also in maintenance where people keep things once built in a con-
dition so they keep performing the functions they were built for. This
varies across regions but the trend is fairly consistent.

The Internet does not really matter here, other online projects where
people build things also suffer from low female participation. I make
open source software, very few women there, I make web standards, help
design and define the technology that enable things like Wikipedia, you
don't get to see many women there either, I follow the Demoscene, a
competitive computer art sub-culture where men compete on who makes the
best animations, computer graphics, digital music, and so forth, and
when you spot a woman there it's probably a girlfriend. Female parti-
cipation increases as you move towards individual self-expression, say
creating fan-artwork, or as you mention blogs and "social media", I'd
suppose product reviews, general "talk" forums and chats, and so on.

If all boys would, as they grow up, play nursing baby dolls, play having
the neighbours over for dinner, dress up Ken with various clothes and
accessories; and girls would be building lego space ships to conquer the
galaxy, would command grand armies in computer games, would play with
action figures of super heros that fight for truth and justice, who'd be
writing Wikipedia then? I don't know the answer, but it seems obvious to
me that in order to understand the Wikipedia "gender gap" you would have
to understand how to reverse the roles, make it so Wikipedia is edited
mostly by females, not just how to remove what some suspect a deterrent
might be to increase participation by three or so percentage points. And
so the most important answer you'll find in surveys is that women often
are unsure why they should contribute to Wikipedia, while this seems to
come naturally to men.

>I have seen a number of quantitative studies, which unambiguously
>confirm the existence of the gender gap as such, but I have seen very
>little on what causes it to be so persistent in the Wikiverse. There
>is a number of commonly proposed explanations such as the discussion
>culture and the poor usability.

If those were the main issues, you would have to address them in a form
where the improvements only attract women without attracting more men to
actually close the "gender gap", or at least disproportionally so. That
may be rather difficult to achieve beyond the margins of error in sur-
veys.
-- 
Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjoern at hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de
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