On 18 June 2012 15:36, Sarah Stierch sarah.stierch@gmail.com wrote:
Well, I'll be honest:
I don't really care about detailed research unless it shows our numbers changing at this point :-) (better or worse)...
I am focusing my energy on taking action versus research investment. So perhaps I shouldn't even bother with this conversation. We all know we have few women editing :-/
I agree with Sarah.
The difference between 9% (the lowest estimate I've seen) and 13% (the highest) is pretty irrelevant compared to the difference between trying to go from 9-13% to something more like 25%.
Further research seems kind of pointless: we know there's an issue, so let's fix it.
A more useful avenue of research would be trying to find out what interventions might actually be useful in fixing the gender gap. It seems that a fair few people come to the gender imbalance and have a solution. Funnily enough, the solutions always seem to be solutions to problems they have with the wiki more generally (whether it's dodgy images on Commons or lack of civility or problematic notability standards). It's almost as if they have their hobby horse and they want to use gender as a new battleground for said issue.
I'm glad that a lot of what the Foundation seem to be doing is trying to be evidence-based and are analysing the effectiveness of the various interventions (Teahouse, FeedbackDashboard, AFT5). One thing that probably ought to be done is to demand of the Foundation and of chapters that any studies they do into the effectiveness of outreach and intervention programmes include gender inclusiveness as a measure in stats-gathering where possible.