[Gendergap] Fwd: Gender preference

[Sage Ross]

We're crossing streams a bit between this list and wikitech-l.

On Fri, Feb 11, 2011 at 10:58 AM, Lars Aronsson <lars at aronsson.se>
wrote on wikitech-l:

>
> One thing that could be interesting is to trace
> the career of users: When they register, how
> frequent they edit, if the frequency varies
> over time, and if these patterns differ between
> men and women and the gender-anonymous.
>

User:Dispenser is working on something similar, I think for the next Signpost.

Take a look at this (a work in progress and not mine, so please don't
distribute):
http://toolserver.org/~dispenser/temp/gender/total_edit_zero_2011-02-10.png

The table at the left traces gender identification rates for editors
with less than or equal to the listed number of edits (but more than
the previous row).  So the first row is editors with 0 edits, the
second is editors with 1 edit, the third is editors with 2-3 edits,
then 4-7 edits, etc.  The last row is everyone with over ~65k edits
(and less than 5,000,000).  It's based on essentially the 250,000 most
recent users who have edited or created an account.

So the takeaways are:

a) the more edits you make, the more likely you are to declare your gender.

b) the ratio of declared females to males falls from about 20% for
people who make just zero or one edit, to a stable 5-6% for people who
make 1000 or more edits.

Of course, as Woonpton notes, there could be factors that distort
that.  Maybe women who become active editors are more likely than
other women to *not* declare gender.  But at first glance, it would
seem that the gender gap is larger among very active editors.

-Sage