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=bu... http://www.businessinsider.com/wikipedia-is-hampered-by-its-huge-gender-gap-... http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/01/wikipedias-gender-problem http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/wikipedia/8293217/Why-Wikipedias-edito... http://www.tgdaily.com/software-brief/53845-85-of-wikipedia-entries-are-made... http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/discoblog/2011/01/31/on-friendship-bracele... http://jezebel.com/5747740/why-wikipedia-needs-more-ladies http://www.theatlanticwire.com/opinions/view/opinion/Where-Are-All-the-Wiki-... http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2011/01/31/133375307/facing-serious-gend... http://technolog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/01/31/5960810-dude-centric-wikiped... 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-wikip... 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
Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. Help us make it a reality!