[Foundation-l] Do we even know if there is a Gender Gap

[Pedro Sanchez]

On Mon, Feb 21, 2011 at 11:49 AM, James Heilman <jmh649 at gmail.com> wrote:
> We have heard a great deal lately about a "gender gap". Is there really a
> gender gap? With 93% of editor not marking there gender known per
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2011-02-14/News_and_notes
> <http://ref>might it just be that female editors prefer to keep there gender
> unknown which seems like an equally valid explanation of the results.
>
> --
> James Heilman
> MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian
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The conclusion from the study on which the figure of 12-14 or
something women has several metodological flaws in my view.
Mainly about the representativity of the sample from the survey

See http://www.wikipediasurvey.org/docs/Wikipedia_Overview_15March2010-FINAL.pdf
and http://www.wikipediasurvey.org/docs/Wikipedia_Age_Gender_30March%202010-FINAL-3.pdf

If you take those numbers as unbiased estimators of sampled
population, you come to the conclusion (from page5, 1st doc) that
Wikipedia has the mindboggling amount of.. 200 thousand readers.

But I guess it's useful to think of the conclusions there derived as
accurate, for sake of discussion.


Then, I don't want to get into problems (as that figure and the
gendergap seem to have become sacred topics these days) so I will just
not rock the boat, leaving those links for those with actual
statistics knowledge to read.