[Gendergap] Fwd: Gender preference

[Andreas Kolbe]

--- On Fri, 11/2/11, Ism Woonpton <woonpton at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: Ism Woonpton <woonpton at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [Gendergap] Fwd: Gender preference
> To: "Increasing female participation in Wikimedia projects" <gendergap at lists.wikimedia.org>
> Date: Friday, 11 February, 2011, 16:18
> Please, please, please be careful
> here.  The data offered here answer
> the question "How many editors self-identify on Wikipedia
> as female?"
> not the question "How many females edit Wikipedia?" There's
> a very
> important difference, and these numbers should not be
> generalized
> beyond the small percentage of editors who give their
> gender in
> "preferences" on Wikipedia.  In other words, of the
> 280,285 people (2%
> of all editors) who identify their gender,  16%
> self-identify as
> female.   It is very probable that women who
> self-identify as women
> (and who are interested  enough to say so in
> "preferences") differ in
> important ways from women editors as a whole.  To use
> that number as a
> proxy for "How many of the 13+million editors are
> female?"  would be a
> serious mistake.  The survey with over 100,000
> responses, which was
> purported to be anonymous (although I know of at least one
> woman who
> refused to give her gender even on that survey because she
> didn't
> trust the assurance of anonymity) is a much more valid
> estimate of
> female participation.  Not perfect by any means, but
> certainly better.
> 
> The only thing these numbers tell *me* is that editors on
> Wikipedia,
> male and female, aren't terribly interested in identifying
> themselves
> by gender.  I wouldn't draw any conclusion, even
> tentative, from it
> beyond that, or use this as a number to (shudder)
> "extrapolate from."
> If you're going to extrapolate, you need something solid
> to
> extrapolate from.
> 
> Woonpton




Spoken like a true statistician, and absolutely correct. :)

Andreas




> On 2/11/11, paolo massa <paolo at gnuband.org>
> wrote:
> > I posted on my blog the table. See
> > http://www.gnuband.org/2011/02/10/percentage_of_men_and_women_on_different_wikipedias/
> >
> > Amir left a comment saying that the User: namespace in
> Russian is
> > translated into the equivalent of User_male: (I guess
> if the user set
> > male in the preferences as gender) and User_female:
> (if female in the
> > preferences).
> >
> > Do you know if this happens in other wikipedia as
> well?
> > In Russian Wikipedia, if gender is not set, how User:
> is rendered?
> > With the male equivalent or there is a neutral form?
> >
> > P.
> >
> > On Thu, Feb 10, 2011 at 4:39 PM, Joseph Reagle <joseph.2008 at reagle.org>
> > wrote:
> >> On Wednesday, February 09, 2011, Oliver Keyes
> wrote:
> >>> So, depressingly, it looks like en-wiki is
> actually doing the best! :P.
> >>> Any
> >>> chance we could have that broken into
> percentages?
> >>
> >> My preliminary tabulation shows WP in the middle.
> Also, oddly, a lot of
> >> Russians apparently gender declare. One of the odd
> things with the survey
> >>  from which the 13% is derived is how many
> Russians participated. Maybe
> >> the really like to identify with WP?
> >>
> >> en.wikipedia :  2.01% declared: 233312 men; 46973
> women; women are 16.76%
> >> de.wikipedia :  3.47% declared:  35726 men;
>  4800 women; women are 11.84%
> >> fr.wikipedia :  2.16% declared:  18556 men;
>  3054 women; women are 14.13%
> >> commons      :  2.26% declared:  27980 men;
>  5070 women; women are 15.34%
> >> sr.wikipedia :  2.66% declared:   1666 men;  
> 414 women; women are 19.90%
> >> ru.wikipedia : 16.80% declared:  80491 men; 23750
> women; women are 22.78%
> >> pl.wikipedia :  3.64% declared:  12106 men;
>  2999 women; women are 19.85%
> >> nl.wikipedia :  2.92% declared:   8977 men;
>  1781 women; women are 16.56%
> >>
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> Gendergap mailing list
> >> Gendergap at lists.wikimedia.org
> >> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
> >>
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > --
> > Paolo Massa
> > Email: paolo AT gnuband DOT org
> > Blog: http://gnuband.org
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Gendergap mailing list
> > Gendergap at lists.wikimedia.org
> > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
> >
> 
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