[Foundation-l] Gender issues, a short analysis

[David Koenig]

I have to admit, I'm getting bored by this wikichix discussion...
The advocates of the new list tell us over and over again that there
is a problem but none of them has so far given a detailed answer of
what the problem exactly consists. So I decided to do their homework
for them and made a short analysis of my home wikipedia, the german
wikipedia. Maybe this turns the debate into a more constructive one...

==Gender ratio in the german wikipedia==

Schroer & Hertel, psychologists from Wuerzburg, found a gender ratio of
86% to 14% in a voluntary survey among german Wikipedians.
[http://wy2x05.psychologie.uni-wuerzburg.de/ao/publications/pdf/wikipedia_poster_fg_2005.pdf]

I made a different approach today and took the 500 most active
contributors from http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Beitragszahlen
and sorted them by gender, according to my personal knowledge, gender
revealing user names (male or female prenames) or personal details
revealed on user pages. Users where no gender could be assigned were
marked as unknown.
Came up with a gender ratio even worse, only 5,8% among the 500 could be
clearly identified as female.

Gender	Number	%
male	420	84,0	
female	29	5,8	
unknown	50	10,0	

==Admins, Buerocrats, Checkusers==
Among the 245 administrators of the german Wikipedia, 18 have identified
themselves as female, a percentage of 7,3, slightly higher than the
percentage among the 500.

male	227	92,7%
female	18	7,3%
Sum	245	100,0%	

Both two buerocrats are male, two of the three checkusers are female.

==Admin candidatures==
A count of failed and successful admincandidatures (data from 2005 and
2006) revealed no great differences among the genders. The rate of
successful female candidatures is with 64,7% vs. 59,2% slightly higher.

 	 	 	Sex			Sum
			male	female	unknown		sum
unsuccessful	nr.	95	       6	  6	               107
		       %	40,8%	35,3%	50,0%	 40,8%	
successful	nr.	138	       11	  6	               155
		       %	59,2%	64,7%	50,0%	 59,2%
Sum		       nr.	233	       17	 12	               262
		       %	100,0%	100,0%	100,0%	100,0%

==User bans==

Four users in user ban votes could be clearly identified as female
(Statistics based on a summary done by Sebmol). Half of them were banned
compared to 35/22 among - probably - male users.

	       m.   f.      unknown	sum
no ban	22	2	 1      25
ban	       35	2	 2      39
Sum	       57	4  	 3      64

==Other==

Jury members of the writing contests, m/f
1st: 4/1
2nd: 4/1 (one male acting as a replacement of an elected woman)
3rd: 4/1
4th: 5/1
5th: 4/2

==Culture==

Harassment of female users is usually sanctioned by the community.
Vandals usually ignore the gender of admins they insult (I'm refering
here to the countless insult accounts like "Admin X is gay", "Admin X
is fucking Admin Y")
Unappropriate comments to female users can lead to the loss of admin
elections (cmp.
http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Adminkandidaturen&oldid=13342694#C.L.C3.B6ser
where an otherwise well suited candidate lost his elections due to
comments some female users perceived as sexist)

One case of stalking is known to me, in this case the stalker came
from outside (acting as anonymous IP), the affected user was provided
with moral and legal support from other community members.

One other affair worth being mentioned is those of a couple of
userboxes which were perceived as sexist (example: a picture of a red
haired porn star with the text like "This user loves the color red",
"This user loves women", "This user loves blonde women" etc.) Those
were speedy deleted.

The major gender-related debate concerns the naming conventions.
German Wikipedia uses the generic masculine form for article titles
and categories, a rule which was repeatedly put in question. However,
these debates seem to be driven mostly by male users, female users
rarely weigh in and if they do, they do on both sides (see
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Diskussion:Namenskonventionen/Binnen-I).

==Real life and Wikipedia==

Since the issue of childcare has been raised already... Based on IRC
conversations and real life meetings, this seems to me rather a male
problem in the german wikipedia. There are much more fathers than
mothers who have to accomodate their wikipedia activity with the needs
of their children.

==Summary==

In sum, female participation in the german wikipedia seems appallingly
low, however we find a slightly higher ratio of women in "higher"
ranks like admins, jury members than the overall participation numbers
would suggest.
To discover a gender bias in Wikipedia culture more thorough research
would probably be needed, the here quoted most prominent examples
rather suggest a high awareness in gender issues and a willingness
from the community as whole to sanction transgressions.

HTH,
David