[Gendergap] Monitoring impact on female participation

[Sydney Poore]

On Sat, Oct 1, 2011 at 6:41 AM, Chris Keating <chriskeatingwiki at gmail.com>wrote:

> So how can we measure what impact we're having on getting women to
> participate?
>
> Over the next few months Wikimedia UK's very going to be adopting a rather
> more formal set of reporting procedures. I just wondered if people on this
> list had any thoughts about how we could build in some gender impact
> assessment into this reporting.
>
> It should be fairly easy for the Board to ask for statistics on how many of
> the people attending events are men and how many are women. Ideally we would
> also have statistics on how many people attending events *who then go on to
> edit/join/otherwise take part* available by gender. It should be even easier
> to monitor the diversity of our staff (currently we have 2, both are male)
> and Wikimedians in Residence (also currently 2, both male) and indeed the
> board (err.... 7 men) - hopefully these statistics will be a bit better in a
> year's time.
>
> Does anyone have any more thoughts on how we should approach this?
>
> Regards,
>
> Chris
>
> PS. Also, you might be interested to know that we've identified a £10k
> budget for "broadening impact" - i.e. additional funding for projects which
> are aimed at women, Scotland, Wales, ethnic or linguistic minorities - I
> think this is a good thing but we do need to make sure the remaining £500k
> isn't spent only on white Englishmen ;-)
>
>
Chris,

Excellent that you are building measurable indicators into your plan. It is
very basic to planning to have good measurable indicators. When we were
doing the WMF Strategic Planning process, it was difficult to make good
decisions in some instances because of lack of data. That is being changed
at WMF now with many more surveys and other ways of capturing data. But we
still need to build it into other processes, too. So, I applaud you for
doing it. :-)

You have identified several good measures such as head counts of staff,
chapter members, and people attending events.

Money spent is also a  good measure.

Things such as offering shirts for sale in women's style and sizes could
show if more women are participating more if sales go up.

(Sidenote:I really appreciated the WikiMania planning team in Israel
offering shirts for women. While many younger females don't mind as much,
most older females don't care for T-shirts made for the male figure and
won't wear them out in public.)

Also dollars spent on projects targeted at females if outreach is being
done. Like co-sponsoring events with women's groups.

Also, finding a way to measure editing contributions from male v. female
coming from UK would be good. That is more difficult but perhaps doable if
you work with the WMF staff when they do their surveys.

Also, I've been told that it is hard to do a retrospective assessment of an
specific group of users edits. But if they are identified upfront it is
doable. So, maybe you could work with WMF staff and have users attending
outreach editing events to have their accounts identified for follow up of
their contributions.

Sydney
User:FloNight
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