85% men 15% women
It won’t do, you see. The Wikipedia gender imbalance thing – when taken with all the other gender imbalance things – won’t do.
Jane Margolis, co-author of a book on sexism in computer science, “Unlocking the Clubhouse,” argues that Wikipedia is experiencing the same problems of the offline world, where women are less willing to assert their opinions in public. “In almost every space, who are the authorities, the politicians, writers for op-ed pages?”…
According to the OpEd Project, an organization based in New York that monitors the gender breakdown of contributors to “public thought-leadership forums,” a participation rate of roughly 85-to-15 percent, men to women, is common — whether members of Congress, or writers on The New York Times and Washington Post Op-Ed pages.
Or atheists talking at atheist or secularist or skeptical conferences. That won’t do, because it perpetuates itself. As Clay Shirky points out, if most “authorities” are men, then the voice of authority sounds male. That’s no good.
It would seem to be an irony that Wikipedia, where the amateur contributor is celebrated, is experiencing the same problem as forums that require expertise. But Catherine Orenstein, the founder and director of the OpEd Project, said many women lacked the confidence to put forth their views. “When you are a minority voice, you begin to doubt your own competencies,” she said.
What I just said. The voice of authority sounds male; you’re a minority voice so that must be for a reason and the reason must be that you’re not competent so…you’d better just be quiet.
That’s no good.
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Skeptic South Africa, Wayne de Villiers. Wayne de Villiers said: 85% men 15% women – It won't do, you see. The Wikipedia gender imbalance thing when taken with all the other gender… http://ow.ly/1b7wwc […]
Well, it’s not quite the same thing, is it? We can fault the organizers of those conferences for failing to value particular voices. The Wikipedia thing is more about who puts themselves forward as a voice.
I’m afraid it might just be that men are more likely to be enamored of recognition, even if it’s anonymous. Is there a way that we can get more women to want to be self-promoting assholes? I don’t know, but I fear that’s the question.
By the way, do you know how to contribute to Wikipedia? I don’t. That might be part of it, too.
Twenty five years ago, we had about as many female students as male students in our computer science program. Now there are few female students. I’m not sure of the reason for the change, though it is correlated with the growth in importance of personal computers.
Around 35 years ago, I was in the checkout lines at a Toys R Us store. There was a women with a two year old boy. She was saying to her son “No, you cannot have a pink balloon. You can have a blue balloon or a red balloon, but not a pink balloon. Pink is for girls.” The boy was most unhappy, and continued asking for the pink one. Sexism is alive and well, and spread by mothers (some, not all, mothers).
Contributing to Wikipedia is a matter of creating an account and editing existing articles, whether for vocabulary, grammar or factual information. I have done it a few times, but generally shy away from it.
I do think that there is a major gender problem in atheist groups and conference and as member of the board of the Minnesota Atheists, I am discouraged that the board has a mostly male presence, and the lone exception has chosen not to sit on the board this year, We have questioned what we are doing to make it so that women minorities are discouraged from running for the board, and I guess that it turns out we are not coming up with the right answers. Perhaps it is because just us boys are asking and we are not sure what questions to ask of female members to find out why they are not running.
I am starting to think that we should emulate the Democratic Party and put requirements in our bylaws to apportion leadership based on gender and race. It’s difficult when we don’t know what we are doing wrong to come up with solutions to it.
We know that there are a lot of women atheists. They come to the meetings, and we invite women to speak.
We are at a loss and open to suggestions.
I think this is where atheist conventions can make an important contribution to the larger world culture – if we can put forward women making solid arguments (And there is no shortage of women making solid atheist arguments) we can do our bit to shift society as a whole.
Despite my online moniker, I am a male. The local freethought group of which I am a member had for quite some time been nearly a 50/50 split between men and women. This has changed recently and I find it a bit distressing. I think our former 50/50 split had more to do with chance than anything and I think the same is true for the more recent move towards a more male dominated (in terms of numbers) group. I find this very distressing for several reasons:
1) Because I am a heterosexual male. This may sound like a sexist preference, but I deeply value the input of female members. In fact, I tend to feel more comfortable with women in general.
2) Female members often seem to have different points of views that us guys would not think of. These points of view are often very informative and enlightening. I miss that.
3) This again runs the risk of sounding sexist, but I love women for multiple reasons. As the XTC song ‘Church of Women’ (about a church that worships women) says “I want to worship at the church of women, breathe them in till my head goes spinning around.” Women offer a dynamic (not necessarily sexual) that I sorely miss when I’m at a gathering of only – or at least mostly – male atheists/skeptics…or as one of my favorite female group members put it in reference to a male dominated gathering: a sausage-fest.: ) Women add a certain degree of balance that is indispensable.
4) The overall mood of a gathering can be affected by the gender balance or lack thereof. Certainly, a “guy’s night” can be fun on occasion, but I prefer a more egalitarian, inclusive gathering. It’s not just inclusiveness for its own sake; there is actually a different feel and a difference in intellectual content when women are are present as opposed to when they are not.
It is my hope that my post does not read as incoherently as I imagine it does. My overall point is that the lack of female input – whether on wiki, at atheist/skeptic conferences, in business, in society, in the group to which I belong – is harmful and leaves us lacking in balance and insight.
We really do need more women’s voices.
If I could be a woman (all right, just temporarily), I would make my voice heard, just like Ophelia does (then I might switch back to a man for familiar reasons that I’ve thought hard and long about).
All joking aside, it’s not about Wikipedia. It’s about encouraging young women and girls to be confident.
“It won’t do, you see.”
I thought this might be irony, but I’m not sure it is. Maybe it’s gone straight past me.
If it’s not irony, what are your proposals for working towards equal numbers of contributors, given that anyone can create or update a wiki ? Admittedly there are some obsessive gatekeepers, who may edit your piece or remove it as ‘not notable’, and they’re mostly male, but this only affects a few politically sensitive topics.
A self-denying ordinance among male contributors ? I think there are mechanisms in Wiki for contacting contributors – a mass mailshot ?
A campaign to encourage more females ?
But isn’t it possible that men are
a) more nerdy, fact-obsessed, ‘thing’-obsessed ?
b) more likely to want to show their knowledge off aka share it with others ?
Or would that imply that either
i) we’re different (on average – I’m sure that there’s as much variation inside sexes as between them) OR
ii) we’re the same (Blank Slate) but it’s all that social conditioning wot done it ? In which case it’s not really Wikipedia that’s the problem.
It’s great that the media have noticed Wikipedia’s current drive to fix their gender representation.
I was at an event the other month where the difference between the museums & galleries crowd (which seemed 50/50) and the Wikipedia crowd (mostly male, apart from Sue Gardner and a couple of other people) couldn’t have been more pronounced.
To their credit, the Wikipedians were open about this, acknowledged it as a problem, and scheduled a discussion of it where they could learn from the museums & galleries people.
Pink is always the answer.
Unfortunately, in America, most (not all, but most) females are still raised – socialized – with the priority of “getting a man.” Men are socialized to get a job, a career.
If there is doubt, just watch some of the programming on TV: shows about women competing for men, shows about getting the best wedding dress, etc.
This may be changing, but change is slow.
Ken, You just click on the ‘edit’ link n any Wikipedia page. And that’s probably part of the problem. I’ve had a Wikipedia account for many years but rarely sign into it preferring to make anonymous edits simply because I have no interest in getting involved in anything approaching an edit war. Since I would be surprised if many women didn’t do the same and for the same reasons, I would take the surveys mentioned in the article with a large chunk of salt. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a problem but young, slightly autistic, males obsessing over their particular interests has little to do with it. Seriously, the imbalance in the attention paid to a relatively obscure author and a character in a hugely popular video game is supposed to be about gender? If you choose to add information about Mexican feminist writers or Manolo Blahniks , provided it’s properly referenced, the nerd-boys are unlikely to give you any grief – they’ll be too busy adding bios for the characters from Grand Theft Auto 23 or whatever else has grabbed their fancy this month. OK, I know this is starting to sound like a rant but to me it looks very much like just another case of the old media not understanding the new. The article touches very briefly on the cultural issues that need to be addressed to make Wikipedia more female friendly (and people-in-general-friendly) but as soon as it does it veers away because it just can’t understand them. And that matters because Wikipedia represents a real (and indeed unprecedented) opportunity to bypass entrenched attitudes and articles like this just scare people away.
While the problem identified by the NY Times article is very real, the article itself is not very good. In particular the examples supposedly showing a bias effect in Wikipedia entries as a result of the gender imbalance are quite poor. I am 100% convinced that such a bias shows through, and pretty damn strongly at times I’m afraid — but come on. The Niko Bellic vs. Pat Barker thing is not an example of gender bias on Wikipedia, it’s an example of a quite separate problem that Wikipedia has, namely that pop culture topics tend to be covered very thoroughly, while academic and scholarly subjects are spotty.
I mean, compare the article on Hannah Montana to the one on noted Puerto Rican poet Jose Antonio Davila:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannah_montana
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Antonio_D%C3%A1vila
Is this evidence that Wikipedia’s coverage is biased against men and in favor of women? Of course not! It’s evidence that Wikipedia’s coverage is biased against poets and authors and in favor of banal nonsense.
There are similar problems with every single one of the other examples cited in the article. Oh, all the examples (except for one) illustrate <i>some</i> problem or other with Wikipedia — it’s America-centrism, it’s superior ability to collate facts as opposed to synthesize concepts, the aforementioned pop culture bias, etc. — but I don’t think any of them are really illustrative of the gender bias problem!
Part of the problem, I think, is that I would be surprised if one could really point to a clear unambiguous example of gender bias in Wikipedia’s articles — just like in the modern developed world, the most pernicious forms of bias are the ones that are mostly invisible.
Anyway, I should shut up about it now, because I’m planning to do a blog post on this, and I don’t want to steal my own thunder.
BTW, I thought the best part of the article was the part Ophelia highlighted about how being in a minority view makes people “question their own competencies.” Having worked behind the scenes at Wikipedia, I can say that it appears to me to be a very unwelcoming place for women.
While I maintain that one would be hard-pressed to cite an unambiguous example of gender bias in the actual article coverage, it is quite easy to point to misogyny and gender bias in the Talk pages. And that has to translate through to a subtle and pernicious bias in the articles themselves. (Even if the examples in the NYTimes article are all very poor)
How do you verify the sex of someone on Wikipedia? People have got in trouble assuming sex is correctly reported in chat rooms.
I’m confident 85% is correct, but i don’t know that confidence is the issue. Raising girls to aspire to be princesses and to have dream weddings may have more to do with it.
Kat Walsh (Wikipedian, cool) on this –
http://www.mindspillage.org/wiki/Women_on_Wikipedia
If people are interested in editing Wikipedia there’s a guide here –
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Introduction
There’s more to it than clicking the edit button, but a few basic concepts will stand you in good stead.
Laban – it’s not irony, but it’s directed at women as well as at “men” or “the system” or “hidden barriers” or whatever the more obvious target might seem to be. I was alerted to the Times article yesterday by some messages on the Women’s Studies list, and the first thing I did was not to write this post or even to read the Times article but to send a “hang on, what about” message to the list.
I think women need to get more active as opposed to passive about this kind of thing. Part of what I think “won’t do” is for women to shrug and do nothing.
Having participated in Wikipedia for years, I can confidently say that there’s no anti-female or anti-feminist environment there. Nothing can be done to make Wikipedia a more woman-friendly environment, since Wikipedia is already very politically correct, and any expression of anti-female attitudes would be frowned upon, to say the least. If relatively few women choose to participate in Wikipedia, that is because relatively few women are interested in it; they tend not to go in for that kind of stuff.
I recently did an outreach event for my company, talking with engineering students from local universities. I was impressed — out of 23 or so students I talked with, 13 were female.
Either number 18 was snark, or we find that Wikipedia is staffed by people who think women don’t go in for Wikipedia stuff.
Please tell me it was snark. Please.
I’m afraid it wasn’t snark.
If it’s true that women “tend not to go in for that [Wikipedia] kind of stuff” then women need to learn better. “That kind of stuff” is research, knowledge, communication of knowledge, writing, correcting, etc etc – it’s a pretty broad swathe of intellectual life. If women tend not to go in for it, they need to do better.
The one bit of outright sexist assholery I remember from my years as a Wikipedian (2004–2006, roughly) was directed at me, funnily enough. A tiresome oaf who kept trying to promote his own Theory of Absolutely Everything (Which The Establishment Scientists Have Foolishly Rejected) tried a little verbal bullying on me; I contributed under a pseudonym, and somehow he got the mistaken impression that I was female.
(He got banned, eventually, and has probably been trying to hawk his ToAEWTESHFR on other sites, ever since.)
Unsystematic, anecdotal and hardly indicative of anything, of course — this was, I imagine, roughly one Nth of what some people have to put up with every week.
Gender bias in Wikipedia is a really important topic precisely because there are no specific barriers to participation. If there is a massive discrepancy in Wikipedia editors, then it implies the problem is either (i) there is a mysterious gender bias in Wikipedia that nobody has identified, or more likely IMHO (ii) the bias is at a deeper level than Wikipedia — probably in cultural norms that push women away from wiki editing because they feel less comfortable voicing their knowledge or opinions in a bustling, sometimes antagonistic space.
Also, any solutions are fraught with difficulty. Do we want to help by dialling down the intensity of public debate? (The Mooney solution to everything.) Do we want to give special support to female voices? (And be accused of reverse sexism.) Do we want to encourage women to feel more comfortable with verbal stoushing? (Which would mean more Sarah Palins, Ann Coulters, and Jenny McCarthys.) My own feeling is that a selective balance of approaches is needed. It’s about time the worst of the current political firebrands lost their advertisers (about the only time Glenn Beck has apologised for anything was when he lost 57 advertisers for calling Obama a racist). It’s about time women could be openly vocal without suffering for it (great Onion headline from 2006: “Hillary Clinton Is Too Ambitious To Be First Female President”). It’s about time that verbal stoushing was reserved for people who bring actual arguments and evidence to the table and was no longer rewarded for kooks promoting insane anti-reality obstinacy (imagine how fast Oprah would dump Jenny McCarthy if advertisers dropped out in protest at her promoting child deaths).
I was thinking just this morning about the Australian sceptic Kylie Sturgess, and how it’s really a disgrace that someone of her expertise and ability to get up in front of a crowd isn’t strongly sought after, while some of the guys who make it onto the stage often aren’t anywhere near as good.
It’s not just affirmative action, the gender issue aside some people should rightly be thrown under the bus to make way for her.
Kylie’s just one example of course. There are plenty of female sceptics deserving a higher profile, and guys worthy of being ignored (I nominate Penn Jillette to start with).
It’d be an interesting question to put to the party of nice, if they really are as dedicated to reaching out to groups poorly represented in sceptic numbers; ‘which dudes get thrown under the bus?’
Incidentally, I studied IT at Uni as a minor in my science degree, and I know it’s only anecdote, but geez, the number of misogynistic virgins with pretend prowess I ran into!
The specific barriers to entry in Wikipedia are a confrontational, competitive, rules-lawyering, argumentative culture. Where each of those things are expressed in a way that (some) men will enjoy fighting about but that anyone with any sense will think twice about subjecting themselves to. Whether one regards this as gender neutral or not depends on whether one’s gender.
“If women tend not to go in for it, they need to do better.”
That’s a position worth arguing for, but they won’t do better up to 50%, absent some amazing brain programming breakthrough. I’ve just looked at the 24 comments and you’re the only identifiably female moniker. People like Florence Devouard are not rare, but nowhere near 50% of wiki gurus.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Anthere
Men are
a) more nerdish – inclined to obsessive collection of knowledge that is not immediately relevant to their own lives.
b) more likely to express their opinions publicly (and loudly) – the internet gives a voice not so much to the voiceless as to those voiceless who WANT to say things or simply say ‘look at me’. What am I dong right now?
c) more tolerant of disagreement, controversy and abuse. A common complaint with female political bloggers (Madame Mao or Laurie Penny come to mind), for example, is the stick they get online. I’ve had lefties posting comments about how they hope my daughter dies or expressing the wish that I choke to death or get cancer. It (alas) comes with the territory on some topics. Some people would be seriously upset by that – enough to put them off.
‘Men are
a) more nerdish – inclined to obsessive collection of knowledge that is not immediately relevant to their own lives.’
We’re more inclined to Aspergers too. I’m borderline and I’ll admit my main contributions to Wikipedia have been anoraky-pop culture stuff (part of the bio for Welsh actor Philip Madoc, a little on Logan’s Run)
‘b) more likely to express their opinions publicly (and loudly) – the internet gives a voice not so much to the voiceless as to those voiceless who WANT to say things or simply say ‘look at me’. What am I dong right now?’
I’d say men are more likely to post on things other than their personal lives, which is why Wikipedia is more ‘male’ than, say, Facebook.
‘c) more tolerant of disagreement, controversy and abuse.’
Not just tolerant – some positively revel in it.
Possibly related –
http://geekfeminism.org/2009/08/20/men-bloggers-the-followup-post/
Anyone who has had kids knows that there is a strong biological basis to the behavioral differences between the sexes. Women are at a testosterone deficit right out of the gate. Therefore, nurture, not nature, is the influence which must be fostered.
I would suggest more trucks. Toy trucks, specifically, for young girls in addition to, or perhaps in place of, the usual contingent of dolls with wardrobes, teas sets, etc – all the socializing tools today’s modern young submissive woman needs and understands.
No, give them toy trucks., the bigger the better. Construction equipment is preferable. Make sure they are praised for uninhibitedly and constantly shouting “Vroom Vroom” at the top of their lungs, as their powerful machines lay waste to their domain, forever molding the landscape to their will. This is how the ranks of assertive and confident young women will burgeon. Perhaps a gift of a big old Harley Davidson for her high school graduation.
As far as the gender problem on atheism panels, that is quite perplexing and I am inclined to suggest it may just be God’s will.
Even I have to put up with some, despite extreme nerdishness and general callousness. The reeking misogyny of “Tom Johnson”/You’re Not Helping was just one example of the kind of thing.
I didn’t say anything about 50%.
All this talk about “natural” tendencies ignores out the highly populated female-dominated areas of the internet, which can be quite contentious. Thousands of females post on bulletin boards and LiveJournal and similar sites about their favorite books and tv shows. (Google “Harry Potter fandom” if you don’t believe me). These discussions are absolutely riddled with flamewars and lively vigorous debates. Timid they’re not. These women also write long, well-documented essays about the fiction they’re fans of. These women are geeky and they are aggressive, but they largely do not edit Wikipedia. Why is that? Not for lack of nerdishness. Not for lack of aggression. So why? I suspect it has something to do with the fact that Wikipedia is seen as an Authority now, and women are still told in a million different ways that we don’t deserve authority.
There you go. If that is why, then we really do need to push back.
That’s part of why I posted a couple of photos from my talk in Vancouver, though I took them down again when Sili said that was egotistical. Double-bind here – one reason I hate the whiff of egotism is because it’s yet another truism about women, that all they’re interested in is personal stuff. So that trumped the other feminist goal. Sigh.
I would argue that posting a photo of yourself at a speaking engagement is not about your “personal stuff”, it’s about what you do, and as such is entirely appropriate for you to link from your blog.
<sarcasm>(Posting a picture of one’s brand new boots, on the other hand, would be a stereotypically feminine thing to do. Can you imagine a male blogger ever doing that sort of thing?) </sarcasm>
Hahahaha – see men can get away with doing that.
Not that I could do it if I wanted to. I have no exciting footwear to photograph.
One of the systemic flaws of Wikipedia is the large number of “contributors” who express an attitude such as #18’s–i.e. that everything is perfect and that nothing could possibly be improved with regards to the way the project is run. See also: open source software zealots and other similar gatherings of (usually) American, (primarily) libertarian, (almost exclusively) white men who have plenty of time to squabble over tiny points of order but very little time for stepping back and taking a look at the big picture.
Statistically and in practice, it is a boys’ club, and trying to paper over that by mouthing some weasel words about how “women don’t go in for that sort of thing” is the worst kind of soft bigotry.
“(primarily) libertarian, (almost exclusively) white men who have plenty of time to squabble over tiny points of order but very little time for stepping back and taking a look at the big picture.”
Just wondering – how do you know these people are white males of a certain age?