[Gendergap] Monitoring impact on female participation

[Sarah Stierch]

Chris, (prepare for a babble fest on data)

This is data I'm actually currently gathering as a volunteer. I have a
survey (that isn't perfect, and I wish I could have asked more..but..) I've
developed and I use a tool to monitor project contributors (
http://toolserver.org/~dispenser/cgi-bin/useractivity.py?page=Wikipedia:WikiProject_Public_art/Members&days=365&view=table_).
I also have been in personal contact with over 200 female editors over
the past week. My email box is a little overflowing...of painful stories and
lack of interest in continuing to contribute - flipped with people who are
interested in contributing again because of the email I sent them or like to
share their own ideas on women and retention with me.

The problem is that most women don't identify their gender on their account,
but I'm finding a surprisingly large amount actually identify it on their
userpage (i.e. with a userbox or their name).

Regarding outreach, I have kept tabs on our local outreach and I do follow
up on talk pages, use that tool above I showed you (that Dispenser made) to
check out project productivity (i.e. you'll see with WP:Public Art, which I
co-founded - many of the users were assigned the project for school and most
have never edited again after their school assignment, and the majority are
female (this is based on userpage data etc).  I've also seen with another
female-themed outreach event that out of about 10 only ONE female editor
still contributes since the day of the event, which was months ago.

I'm babbling here, but, I'm obsessed with this data, and someplace in my
mind I think it'll all help myself/WMF/whoever better explore how to close
the gender gap.

On another note - I'm hoping to present the data from my Women and Wikimedia
survey at the end of October with a presentation (hopefully at WMF, but they
don't know that yet...).

-Sarah


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 ;-)
>
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>
>


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and
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