[Gendergap] What are the Poles, Slovenes, Russians and Portuguese doing right in regards to the gender gap?

[Johannes Rohr]

2011/12/29 Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org>:
> On Wed, Dec 28, 2011 at 6:23 PM, Laura Hale <laura at fanhistory.com> wrote:
>
>> What was surprising was some projects have 20%+ female participation for relatively
>> large projects including Russian and Portuguese Wikipedia.  Slovene Wikiquote only
>> has 90 women on it, but they make up 75% of the identified by gender population.
>
> Note that a key function of the gender setting (the one which
> originally motivated its creation) is to make it possible for the user
> to be addressed correctly by the software in their respective
> language. [*]

That would explain, why it is these languages in particular which show
seemingly increased female participation. In Slavic languages,
grammatical gender distinctions are particularly pervasive.  I suppose
that the software addresses you as male by default. So males are less
likely to adjust their setting than females.

Johannes


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Johannes Rohr

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