[Gendergap] Gender Gap: Recapping some basics about what we're doing

[Sue Gardner]

Hey folks,

A colleague at another organization asked me if I'd write up a quick
note recapping the basics about Wikipedia's gender gap and Wikimedia's
response to it. I did it for him, and then thought it might make sense
to also share it here.

It's below.

Thanks,
Sue

In January 2011, the New York Times published a story headlined
“Define Gender Gap? Look Up Wikipedia’s Contributor List,” about the
gender gap on Wikipedia. It was rooted in the finding, from a 2008
UNU-Merit survey developed in partnership with the Wikimedia
Foundation, that only 13% of Wikipedia editors are female.

That piece prompted a flurry of other coverage, including six essays
in the New York Times from academics and other experts, a series of
commentaries in The Atlantic Monthly, opinion pieces in Canada’s
national newspaper the Globe and Mail and in the Ottawa Citizen, and
stories in Discover, Discovery News, Mother Jones magazine, Slate
magazine, the NPR blog, the UK newspaper the Telegraph, The Village
Voice, MSNBC, the Business Insider, TG Daily and the feminist blog
Jezebel. Links at the bottom.

None of that was an accident: we wanted the coverage, and we sought it out.

The Wikimedia Foundation has been aware that Wikipedia had a gender
gap, and we believe it’s a serious problem that needs to be fixed.
Wikipedia’s vision is to contain “the sum of all human knowledge.” The
premise is that everyone is invited to bring their crumb of knowledge
to the table, and together those crumbs become a banquet. If women are
underrepresented at the table, we can’t achieve the vision. So solving
the gender gap is critical.

But it's also very difficult. At Wikipedia, you don’t fix
deeply-rooted cultural problems through top-down mandates: you do it
through discussion. You need to have awareness that there’s a problem,
develop a consensus that it matters, and instigate, facilitate and
support efforts to fix it.

This particular problem is complicated by the fact that solutions
don’t lie entirely within the Wikipedia editorial community, because
important voices are missing there. We knew we would need to bring in
voices from outside, and support them in making themselves heard. Only
then would we have a shot at achieving lasting cultural change. Hence
the New York Times article.

In January, Sue Gardner (Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director) and
Moka Pantages (Wikimedia Foundation Global Communications Manager)
used the occasion of Wikipedia’s 10th anniversary to have an
off-the-record lunch with New York Times staff. At the lunch, we
talked with them about our gender gap. We knew it would stimulate a
big, public conversation. And it did: immediately after the story was
published, we were flooded with media inquiries and offers of help.

* Female columnists and bloggers pledged to try editing Wikipedia
themselves, and urged their readers to do the same. Academic, feminist
and women-in-technology groups started discussing on their internal
lists how they can help.

* Several prominent academics with specializations in gender and
technology offered us their ideas about the origins of the problem.

* An anthropologist offered to help the Wikimedia Foundation design a
study to find out why so few women edit.

* The Wikimedia Foundation launched a new public mailing list to talk
about the issue: in its first two weeks it attracted 150+ members
who’ve made 500+ posts to the list (35 per day).

* A moderator at a popular online forum which has successfully solved
its own gender problems shared what had worked for them.

* Wikipedians conducted an analysis of editor self-identification as
female across multiple language versions of the encyclopedia,
resulting in the finding that the highest proportion of
self-identified women is at the Russian Wikipedia, which is also the
faster-growing Wikipedia.

* Wikipedians created a Facebook group “Women at Wikipedia.”

* Wikipedians have created special wiki-pages and wiki-projects aimed
at brainstorming ideas for fixing the gender gap.

* Wikipedians have proposed using International Women's Day, March 8,
to kick off a special initiative inviting women to become Wikipedia
editors. The staff of the Wikimedia Foundation is currently assessing
how it could support that initiative with banner invitations and by
helping experienced editors self-organize to mentor and support women
who respond to that invitation.

Current state: We've leveraged Wikipedia's visibility to develop
public awareness of the gender gap, resulting in a flurry of
decentralized activity in expected and unexpected forums,
brainstorming potential solutions. Those forums include a healthy mix
of women and men, and experienced Wikipedians and external
perspectives.

Some of the initiatives that have been proposed will fizzle out and
have no impact. But some will flourish. In coming months, we hope to
learn, with some cautious investment on the part of the Wikimedia
Foundation, which catalyzing strategies can successfully increase
female participation in Wikimedia projects. We have a 2015 goal to
increase the percentage of female editors to 25%. As we get smarter
about which strategies work, we will ramp up our investment. The
initial global positive energy around and interest in this topic are
giving us confidence that we can reach our goal.

Links to some of the coverage:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/31/business/media/31link.html?_r=1&src=busln
http://www.businessinsider.com/wikipedia-is-hampered-by-its-huge-gender-gap-2011-1#ixzz1CePqRucs
http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/01/wikipedias-gender-problem
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/wikipedia/8293217/Why-Wikipedias-editors-are-mostly-male.html
http://www.tgdaily.com/software-brief/53845-85-of-wikipedia-entries-are-made-by-men
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/discoblog/2011/01/31/on-friendship-bracelets-and-ninja-turtles-wikipedias-gender-gap/
http://jezebel.com/5747740/why-wikipedia-needs-more-ladies
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/opinions/view/opinion/Where-Are-All-the-Wiki-Women-6785/
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2011/01/31/133375307/facing-serious-gender-gap-wikipedia-vows-to-add-more-women-contributors
http://technolog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/01/31/5960810-dude-centric-wikipedia-needs-more-women
http://news.discovery.com/tech/is-there-a-gender-gap-online.html?print=true
http://www.slate.com/id/2284501/pagenum/all/#p2
http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/world+according/4246585/story.html
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/02/02/where-are-the-women-in-wikipedia
http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2011/01/wikipedia_is_a.php



--
Sue Gardner
Executive Director
Wikimedia Foundation

415 839 6885 office
415 816 9967 cell

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