[Foundation-l] Gender issues, a short analysis

Tue Dec 5 22:16:23 UTC 2006

This was great but you missed where Anthere recounted a number of personally
experienced incidents of harassment.

On 12/5/06, David Koenig <davidkoen at googlemail.com> wrote:
>
> 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
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