2011/12/29 Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org:
On Wed, Dec 28, 2011 at 6:23 PM, Laura Hale laura@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