User:Ragesoss/Gender and Wikipedia

As everyone here can see for themselves, Wikipedia is not a gender-balanced community. The numbers are stark:

• Women tend to be internet users at roughly the same rate as men, maybe even higher. So to a first approximation, about 50% of net users are women
• The 2008 UNU-MERIT survey (which is not perfect but it's the best data we have) reported that 31% of Wikipedia readers are women. That's about a 2:1 imbalance in readership.
• It also reported that just 13% of contributors are women, for about a 7:1 imbalance among editors.
• There's also some evidence that the ratio is even more skewed for the active core of the community. Phoebe has done some research on mailing list activity, and she found that in the last few months, between 2% and 7% of postings on the foundation-l mailing list came from women.

If I saw numbers like that for some random online community, my first thought would be that this community basically has an endemic culture of sexism. That's pretty common online, especially in communities based on anonymity. Widespread sexism is tolerated, usually without comment, in communities that attract similar social groups to Wikipedia, like slashdot and reddit. But for the most part, Wikipedia is not overtly sexist in its social and collaborative aspects. The behavior norms, the quasi-scholarly atmosphere we try to create, doesn't leave a lot of room for the sexist jokes and guy talk that many of our users might engage in in other contexts.

What we have seen before--and readers have noticed--is the results of the gender imbalance and gender attitudes (including sexist attitudes) of the balance of contributors. For example, for a while, the lead image in the article Man was a photo of Michaelangelo's David, a marble statue of idealized masculinity. At the same time, the lead image in the article Woman was Frau-2.jpg, a user-made photograph of a naked woman which is somewhere between clinical and voyeuristic. So some feminists bloggers have extrapolated from this to suggest that Wikipedia is basically a sexist community because of its gender imbalance. On the talk page of that article, the thing that's been discussed more than anything else is which images to use, and especially which one for the lead. And just in terms of achieving a neutral point of view, of representing all the relevant perspectives in our articles, obviously having so few women is a contributing factor to the systemic bias in Wikipedia.

Just like almost everything on Wikipedia, the content of gender-related areas is driven by the interests of our users. And we have helluva lot of boys and young men editing. One of the results of this is that we have 215 files on Commons in the category "Nude women in photography", a large portion of which are sexually charged; the corresponding "Nude men in photography" has 48 files. There are, however, 61 files in the category "male reproductive system", most of which are self-made crotch shots. I think all this reflects broader cultural attitudes about sex and gender more than something specific about the Wikimedia community.

It's an odd paradox, because I would say that our most dedicated users are more educated, more concerned about social justice, and more actively anti-sexist than the male segment of the general internet population. And yet the deeper we go into the Wikimedia community, away from the casual users who are uploading pics of sexy naked women and crotch shots, the fewer women there are. So how do we explain it?

I don't really have any good answers, but I'll note some of the things that other people have observed and suggested.

First of all, Wikipedia isn't alone. A lot of other wikis have similar patterns. RationalWiki, Uncyclopedia, Conservapedia... all of them have serious gender imbalances. In her recent essay about Battlestar Wiki, television scholar Sarah Toton argues that Wikipedia's influence can be seen in the "just the facts" approach that many other wikis take, excluding more personal, speculative or reflexive user-generated content, and that this Wikipedia-style approach is more of a male style of talking and writing about things.

In his book Cyberchiefs, Mathieu O'Neil offers another line of explanation. Hacker culture, which Wikipedia evolved in part from, focuses on confrontational, argumentative styles of discourse. It's okay to rant and flame about abstract issues, intellectual issues, political issues, issues of fact and philosophy, but there isn't much tolerance for anything personal, which is characterized as whining. On Wikipedia, we have the rule of "no personal attacks", and the expectation that discussion should be strictly impersonal. We crack down on anything that strays too far into strictly social beyond conversations on user talk pages. And according to O'Neil, "by aligning themselves with and expressing support for others, women create solidarity and promote harmonious online interaction; whereas by challenging and criticising others, men attract attention to themselves and engage in 'contests', as a result of which they gain or lose status. In general women have a deep aversion to the kinds of adversarial exchange that men thrive on." So by this line of thinking, the gender imbalance may be because Wikipedia does so much to stamp out anything that's seen as social networking or otherwise not directly connect to content-building.

I think it has really serious methodological flaws, but another interesting observation is the result of the psychological study of Israeli Wikipedians that concluded that we're close-minded and grumpy. The sample is really too small to be meaningful, but the researchers reported that female Wikipedians were especially introverted. And that would be consistent with the idea that adversarial and anti-personal culture self-selects for people that feed on conflict rather than social harmony, and thus that only the more introverted women are attracted to the project.

It smacks too much of Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus to me, but there aren't any explanations I've found that are really satisfying. A lot of people, a lot of feminists who have written about the Wikipedia gender imbalance, just find it puzzling.

Interestingly, there's some hopeful data in the age demographics. Women Wikipedia users are skewed towards the young: the UNU-MERIT reports an average age of 24, vs. 26 for men. So it's possible that there's a generational dynamic, that the next generation of women will be joining Wikipedia in larger numbers.