I’ve spent most of my career in public broadcasting, which is a very female-friendly environment. So the lack of women in Wikimedia / free culture / free software / Silicon Valley and the STEM world, has been a real culture shock for me. For anyone who doesn’t already know this: only 13% of Wikimedia project editors are female; less than 2% of free software contributors are female, and women are losing ground, not gaining it, in Silicon Valley tech companies.
I’ve spent a lot of time trying to understand why our space is so gender-imbalanced, and how we can make it better.
Mostly I’ve kept my thoughts to myself thus far, because gender is an emotional topic for lots of people, and I’m not all that interested in arguing about it. But I’ll probably post here occasionally about gender issues. The purpose of this post is to talk about one fantastic book on women in computing, and what we might learn from it.
When I started reading and thinking about women in technology, I kept coming across references to Unlocking the Clubhouse, by academics Jane Margolis and Allan Fisher. Here’s how it’s described by the American Library Association.
Margolis and Fisher document the astonishing gender gap in the field of computing by answering the question of why female interest in technology begins to wane in middle school and all but dies in high school. The authors argue that male dominance in information technology can be traced directly back to cultural, social, and educational patterns established in early childhood. Women, therefore, are vastly underrepresented in one of the most economically significant professions of the twenty-first century. After countless hours of classroom observation and interviews with hundreds of computer science students and teachers, the authors offer an array of formal educational reforms and informal practical solutions designed to rekindle and to nurture female interest in computer design and technology.”
Unlocking the Clubhouse is canonical, maybe because it’s unusually solutions-focused. It studies Carnegie-Mellon, which over a five-year period managed to achieve a 35% increase in female admissions to its computer science school (double the rate of increase for comparable research universities), and brought down the rate of female attrition from double that of men, to nearly the same. If you’re interested in gender in computer science, I highly recommend it. (If you’re on the staff of the Wikimedia Foundation, it’s in our library.)
Below, I’ve extracted bits that I think are particularly helpful for us. Try reading it as though “computer science” meant “Wikimedia,” and “teachers” meant “experienced editors.” I wrote the bolded text; the remainder is direct quotes from the book. Emphasis in the original.
- Deliberately focus efforts on recruiting women. Don’t assume that general outreach efforts will motivate women. Encourage women to recruit other women. “Boys have staked their claim at the computer very early both at home and in schools. Girls who are interested but intimidated, or girls who don’t know what computer science is but could be very interested, need an extra word of encouragement from teachers, parents, or counselors. Rule number one, then, is that teachers have to deliberately focus efforts on recruiting girls. If teachers issue a generic recruitment call, boys turn out. Girls must know the teacher is talking to them. Sometimes all it takes is a few minutes of encouragement to fire a girl’s interest. … Some of the best recruiters of girls are other girls. … two mottoes emerged: “Recruit friendship circles” and “Recruit a posse.”
- Stage and support women-only activities. “These events attract girls who would normally stay away from the classes where they fear being left in the dust or shouted down by more experienced or just plain louder boys. They provide learning environments where girls take risks, take leadership, ask questions, stop worrying about what they do not know, and build confidence.”
- Don’t get dissuaded by opposition. “When teachers begin to make a special effort to recruit girls, they often encounter some opposition. Other teachers, boys, and sometimes girls may object that special efforts to recruit girls are not fair. … This is an important teaching opportunity: an opportunity to explain how boys have already been recruited into computer science. Public image, media and marketing of computers have been specifically focused on boys. The gender stereotypes associated with computing tend to pull boys in and push girls away. To balance the influences, a concerted campaign to recruit girls is necessary.“
- Work to create and protect a female-friendly environment. “Computer science classrooms often have the feel of a boy’s locker room. The humor and banter usually reflect the male demographics. Donovan Williams of Madison, Wisconsin, told us of a computer programming contest, organized by a recent high school graduate, that included problems titled “Don’t Forget the Beer” and “Checkin’ Out the Babes.” He wrote to the contest organizer, explaining how the contest call assumed a male audience and could alienate female students. … Much prior research shows that female students in technical disciplines, perhaps because of their “outsider-ness,” are especially vulnerable to poor teaching, inhospitable teaching environments, and unhelpful faculty. Even a small proportion of such occurrences against an otherwise welcoming and supportive background can have severe negative effects.”
- Emphasize social impact. “Women students’ descriptions of why they are majoring in computer science are a “counter-narrative” to the stereotype of computer scientists who are narrowly focused on their machines and are hacking for hacking’s sake. Instead, these women tell us about their multiple interests and their desire to link computer science to social concerns and caring for people. These women may or may not qualify as ‘people people’ on a psychological inventory exam to the same degree as those involved in nursing, social work, or child care, but they need their computing to be useful for society. … A metaanalysis of research on gender and science by Marcia Linn and Janet Hyde concluded that a major sex difference in interests in math and science is its perceived usefulness. … University of Michigan researcher Jacquelynne Eccles reports that the Michigan Study of Adolescent Life Transitions, a longitudinal study of approximately 1,000 adolescents from southern Michigan, found that “women select the occupation that best fits their hierarchy of occupationally-relevant values,” and that helping others and doing something worthwhile for society is high in that hierarchy.”
Further reading: Vel Henson’s classic essay HOWTO Encourage Women in Linux
Sue, as you may or may not know, this question of why there is such a gender imbalance in free and open content communities is the focus of this year’s research. I am (hopefully) on the tail end of a more quantitative study that looks to see if there is bias against female biographical coverage in Wikipedia. But the new work, which I am very excited about, goes back to the questions of community values and discursive norms. Last month I gave a short talk describing some of my thinking on the question. Since then, I have been reading a lot of literature, some of which while pre-Wikipedia and free and open source software, will be really useful. I will also add the text you recommend above to my reading list!
Hi Joseph — when you say it’s ‘the focus of this year’s research,’ do you mean your own research, or FLOSS research / research into Wikikmedia?
I’ve read about your study on your blog; I think it’s super-useful and a good contribution. IIRC you’ve been assessing Wikipedia’s coverage of women against a benchmark of more-conventional reference materials, am I right? That’s a useful assessment for us to have, but I think we’d also want to be cognizant of the fact that conventional reference materials themselves reflect cultural biases: they aren’t an objective capture of reality.
I’m keen to see your new work :-) — and maybe I will post some more references here. I’ve probably read dozens of books on this topic by now, of highly variable quality and relevance. One that springs immediately to mind is How To Suppress Women’s Writing by Joanna Russ — it’s dated, and a polemic, but there’s interesting stuff in it nonetheless.
By this year, I mean my year :-). And, yes, the biographical coverage work is necessarily comparative because any reference work is produced in the context of larger social values/biases. Here’s the abstract:
The research I’m starting now is alluded to here.
Joseph, your new research looks really interesting :-)
One thing I’ve noticed about Wikimedia is how strongly experienced editors seem to define it as being different from, and less inhospitable than, other online environments. I think many of us have been anchored by exposure to less-friendly/more-misogynist online environments, and so by contrast Wikimedia seems like a good safe space for women. But I wonder about the implications of that. Basically, to the extent that we define ourselves as “a lot better than 4chan” … well, that’s a pretty low bar ;-)
This right here is a super thin thread. It is extremely thin! Even though this post is only three sentences long, it will take up much more space than it should, won’t it now?
[Note: A version of this post with clickable links is at http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Wikimedia_for_girls because WordPress silently discards posts with too many URLs in them,
There are a number of issues which would help both women and men, but would help women more. Single payer health care, which the Canadians know saves 40% — a huge amount — isn’t even included in modern budget simulators like the NY Times and the much worse LA Times, which is an abject push-poll because of its inaccuracies about tax rates and only one very limited way to raise taxes on the rich. Clearly universal health care would help women with the bias against longer pregnancy leaves. Also shortening the work week would help relieve stress on everyone while decreasing unemployment. But there is little the Foundation can do directly about those things. The female head of the Foundation, however, has a more powerful pulpit than the Foundation as a whole on those topics.
There are also at least three things that the Wikimedia Foundation could do directly, today. Hans Rosling, the epidemiologist with Doctors without Borders, has pointed out that the fastest economic growth occurs about 15-20 years after the education of girls. To take advantage of this, the Foundation could:
* help both girls and boys by instituting simple wikipedias in languages other than English for beginning readers of all ages;
* implement audio upload using Flash, even before Gnash has audio upload (which the Foundation could fund) to help editors add pronunciations to the wiktionaries (the non-English wiktionaries have very sparse recorded pronunciations) and support reading tutoring applications to help language learners of all ages; and
* implement GIFT with accuracy review instead of staying without low stakes self study assessments. That would also help beginners of all ages.
I have been asking for these things for months, and the reasons against them are the weakest kind of nonsense that men use to keep the clubhouse doors slammed in the face of women: supporting beginners is somehow beneath us (it is certainly beneath the patriarchal guild mentality); Flash isn’t free enough because Gnash doesn’t have microphone upload on all platforms yet (meanwhile the Gnash programmers are starving on shoestring budgets trying to clear that exclusionary hurdle); and the worst one I’ve heard is that nobody has proven a simple parser can parse GIFT both forward and backward yet (even though Moodle’s GIFT parser is barely two pages of PHP!)
Sue, please smash those clubhouse doors wide open!
It is interesting how involvement in the Wikipedia Ambassador Program has a a really high percentage of female participation. As I have started recruiting for the Campus Ambassador positions in the spring for both James Madison University and Western Carolina University, I have actually gotten more female applicants then male applicants. Also our board has 2 females on it, and the presence of females in both the Online and Campus Ambassador roles for this last semester is rather impressive. I think we should continue our outreach to the education community, its a field which has traditionally been dominated by women. The “helping others” priority I think plays an integral in this education oriented approach, I think it definitely should be a priority in our outreach efforts for the future.
The motivation for me to become an Online Ambassador was the people aspect, definitely. I’m a Wikipedian mainly because I love the idea of being able to help people around the world by contributing the little I know, and the concept of helping students to do so themselves was incredible. Much of my work is what I dub “activism”, promoting Wikipedia in schools around my area and introducing others to editing. I guess women naturally gravitate toward these more social roles, something which the oft-bashed WP:NOTMYSPACE and other “it’s about the encyclopedia” statements downplay without consciously thinking about it. We’re an encyclopedia- there’s no doubt about that- without it, there would be no community. But maintaining the community is just as important. And much harder to measure in terms of contributions.
I may be old-fashioned, but I refuse to accept the argument that the encyclopedia isn’t always the first priority. See for a natural result of allowing editors to think that socializing is as equally valid an activity as encyclopedia-building.
Alex & Sonia, it’s interesting, isn’t it? — that (many) women’s participation tends to be explicitly motivated by the desire to help others. Personally I think that’s nurture rather than nature, but it doesn’t really matter: it’s a perfectly reasonable motivation, and wholly consistent with the overall mission and goals of the projects.
To BanyanTree: I actually think ‘the encyclopedia comes first’ argument is a bit of a red herring. Of course the encyclopedia comes first! I know that we’ve had lots of people drop by and try to use Wikipedia as a platform for personal self-expression, because they confused it with Epinions or WordPress or Facebook or something. But I don’t think anybody who has seriously engaged with Wikipedia would make the argument that socializing is the _purpose_ of being here. I think people agree we’re here to build an encyclopedia, and that socializing is a sidebar — a support, intended to make the core work easier and more frictionless.
As a woman on Wikipedia I find that it’s the aggression of the community which is most offputting. Any small disagreements seem to be blown up into arguments instead of rational discussion and although there’s WP:NOT#therapy to always consider, it’s still not pleasant to have to fight against that general tone every day.
I don’t like the idea of women’s only drives/projects though. We want to be a part of the community! Not a separate group that happens to edit inside of it. Making women’s only events not only excludes the majority of the community but makes women on Wikipedia even more ‘other’ than they already are.
yeah Elena, I agree with you. I don’t think women-only activities are the whole answer, and I think it’d be a shame if men and women on Wikipedia couldn’t mix easily together. But there’s a school of thought that says you need to provide safe spaces for women (/other minorities) in the beginning, while they’re getting started. In our context that would be something like providing mentoring and support for women until they reach 200 edits or something.. after which you’d assume they’d be okay without special support. I think that’s the kind of thing the book’s authors are advocating.
to the extent that we define ourselves as “a lot better than 4chan” > ouch.
Your post was very interesting, but I unfortunatly stumbled on something not even babelfish could help me about : could you tell me what “Recruit a posse.” means ?
Ha! Sorry Darkoneko. A posse is a group or team or gang of people who all want the same thing — I think it has origins in law enforcement. Like, ‘the sheriff is going to get together a posse to make the arrest.’ So in context, it means ‘recruit a gang of girls/women who already know and like each other’ — similar to clique, but without the slightly negative connotations.
I see
Thanks :)
Linked here from geekfeminism– This is my first visit to your blog. Hello!
I am a woman (and an experienced writer) who dipped my toes into editing Wikipedia and then backed off really quickly. Perhaps my story can contribute to this discussion.
I like collaborative writing, so I thought Wikipedia might be an enjoyable community. But I also knew enough about the internet, technology, and OS projects to be aware that misogyny was likely to be a problem. So I read through the article on Domestic Violence, specifically to test the misogyny levels before jumping in the pool.
One writer had edited the DV article to add a statement to the effect of “but women hit men, too” to pretty much every paragraph. I read the cited source in support of this claim and found that the writer had badly misrepresented what the report said by choosing very selective pieces of information and doing a lot of original research, which the cited report did not actually support.
I was torn: On the one hand, I do not think that writer was acting in bad faith. I suspect he/she (probably he) is someone who has been personally affected by DV in which a woman was an aggressor against a man, and that is undoubtedly traumatic. I would never want to minimize any victim’s experiences. But regardless of any one person’s experiences, DV as a whole reflects the gender-based power imbalance that generally disadvantages women far more than it does men. And this writer’s edits had the effect of obscuring that. Again, I do not think that was the writer’s intent, but those edits effectively erased the existence of the most common power imbalance in cases of DV.
I considered initiating an effort to revise the article to handle the issue of gender in a balanced way. But I wasn’t willing to do so if it seemed likely that I’d end up in the middle of a bunch of misogynistic vitriol. So I looked in two places to get a sense of what kind of support I might find if I were to raise this issue.
First, the comments on that article itself. The edits had been there for a fairly long time, and no one had critiqued them. There was no sign that anyone had even read the cited sources; apparently, they’d just seen that there was a footnote and moved on. To my eye, the edits were obviously factually wrong even without checking the source, and the fact that they didn’t pop up on the community’s radar suggested that people there weren’t as aware of misogyny as they ought to be.
Next, I looked at the front page of the English-language Wikipedia to get a sense of what first impression the community wanted to make. If there was an indication there of Wikipedia being welcoming of women’s voices, I’d be willing to make an effort. There I saw the “Did you know” box, proudly displaying ten factoids from ten new articles… and two of them were about sports and athletes. I looked through the history of the “Did you know” box, and of the 30-40 examples I looked at in the archive, most days two out of ten articles were about sports. Apparently, Wikipedia’s community thinks that of all the possible interesting things to document in the world, almost 20% of it revolves around sports. (By the way, today is no exception: The ten factoids include a basketball player and a baseball player.)
My conclusion: Wikipedia is a sausage fest. Women’s perspectives aren’t welcome.
I know how much energy it takes to get a woman’s voice heard even in a room that’s half women. In a space that comes across as hostile towards women, it’s positively exhausting. Why on earth would I volunteer my abilities in an environment like that?
I checked out the DV article just now, and it looks like it has improved. It also looks like the discussion exploded at some point (there are now four archives), so apparently someone with more patience than me tackled the issue. Some day when I’m feeling up it, I’ll browse through the comment history and see how the whole thing played out, but that won’t be just now.
Ah, Lisa! I hear you. Thanks for coming here to say this: I hope it’s illuminating for Wikipedians who want the encyclopedia to be better and richer and smarter.
Let me first try to answer your question about why you (or people like you) should bother to volunteer your time and energy. You should do it because 400 million people around the world read Wikipedia. If an article is inaccurate or biased or incomplete, you can fix that, which would enable lots of people to have a better understanding of their world. Wikipedia will only contain ‘the sum of all human knowledge’ if its editors are as diverse as the population itself: you can help make that happen. And I can’t think of anything more important to do, than that.
I say that in no way intending to minimize the challenges in doing it. Wikipedia is very, very male, and you’re right that its maleness is self-reinforcing.
I think it started because back in 2001 when Wikipedia was launched, most people interacting online were tech-centric male early adopters. (And we know why that was: boys are raised to enjoy computers more than girls are, boys are more confident than most girls in their use of technology, men tend to see technology as a fun toy whereas women tend to be more task-focused in their technology usage, many women feel alienated from geek culture, and women have less free time than men, and are less likely to dedicate the time they’ve got towards solitary hobbies.) That original male skew has self-reinforced over time, and you can often see the results of that, for example here at the Articles Nominated for Deletion page. Often when I visit that page, I’m struck by how notability is interpreted according to a young male North American/European worldview.
Having said that, I think the key difference between Wikipedia and other cultural products such as newspapers or TV shows or history books, is that Wikipedia is the product of a self-selected collective – there is no gatekeeper in charge. The foundational premise of Wikipedia is that everyone brings their crumb of knowledge to the table, and the corollary of that is that nobody is responsible for bringing other people’s crumbs. We can’t expect young white Western men to represent the experiences and attitudes and information held by other people. The most we can expect is that people bring what they know, and that they try to remain open to the knowledge and experiences brought by others.
And Wikipedia’s not a typical online community. It’s not 4chan. Personally, I haven’t encountered any misogyny at Wikipedia, and I haven’t heard stories about misogynist behaviour. (I wouldn’t necessarily say the same of the free software world. I’m familiar with the Geek Feminism timeline of sexist incidents in geek culture, and I found myself appalled once to be searching Google Images for the Ubuntu logo, to come across this photograph as the first result. I made a comment on the blog where I found it, expressing, I guess, dismay: my comment was deleted.)
The male Wikipedians (and the females too for that matter) tend to be introverted, scholarly types. They’re not necessarily sophisticated about gender issues, but the worst I’ve encountered is a kind of innocent cluelessness. (I think you’re probably correct for example when you characterized those edits in the Domestic Violence article as well-intentioned.) Upshot: what’s necessary to improve Wikipedia is that underrepresented groups edit more. There are lots of reasons why that isn’t easy to do, but it has to happen, in order for the encyclopedia to be as complete and smart and comprehensive as it needs to be.
It’s quite true that misogyny and every kind of -ism and -phobia you can name run rampant on Wikipedia. It is in many ways a mirror of the biases inherent in our society (without the social filters that normally keep such behavior in check). The good news is that Wikipedia has policies and tools which can limit or mitigate this type of behavior. The bad news is that these policies and tools are rarely used effectively to combat such behavior. There was a discussion recently at WikiProject Feminism on this very issue. I’m not sure what the solution is other than tightening the policies and getting more female editors (perhaps a Catch-22). The overwhelming imbalance makes it difficult to even discuss these issues on-wiki without being overwhelmed with dismissive responses (I see a few in the comments here as well). I think there are signs of hope though. At least there are a few safe spaces and forums emerging for discussing the issue. See for example:
http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Wikipedia
http://wikichix.org/
http://lists.wikia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikichix-l
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Feminism
I would think about it less in terms of creating a female-friendly environment on Wikipedia, and more in terms of creating many female-friendly environments. (To waaay overgeneralize) people start becoming Wikipedians because they have a good experience on an individual talk page.
Wikipedia’s biggest successes in terms of strong topic areas have often been the result of some particular group buying in to Wikipedia, putting in a lot of work, and because of that work, attracting more members of that group. I’m thinking particularly (in recent years) of mathematics and biology. Military history may be similar, although the interest in military history isn’t centered in academia as it is with math and biology. And the same thing happens on smaller scales, for other topics.
Different groups of editors tend to form their own loose “local” communities within Wikipedia centered on the topics they care about, and the social aspects of those local communities can vary quite a bit. Maybe this is part of the reason why experienced editors think Wikipedia is different and better than other online communities… they’ve found (and helped to create) the parts of Wikipedia that suit them best.
One good way forward I see would be trying to reach critical mass, in terms of good content and “local” communities, with more topic areas that are of serious interest to specific groups that include large numbers of smart women. For example, a sustained effort to recruit anthropologists might be one good opportunity.
Sorry, to be a quite off-topic.
I did not find anything regarding the copyright of the blog. Is it thus copyrighted? Or – like we like to do in Wikipedia – is it available under CC-BY-something…?
Thanks.
[…] Unlocking the club house ,aussi par Sue Gardner […]
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In my opinion, the language used in the wikipedia projects must participate women. In the German wikipedia a categoriy is called “Frauenrechtler” this is someone who defendes the rights of wowen. In this category no man is listed but it is not allowed to give to this category a female name. I think its important that men and women find themselves in the language used in the projects.
I hope you have understood my want because my English is not as good as it should.
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[…] the fact that only 13 percent of Wikipedia’s contributing editors were women. She blogged about it, she chimed in on discussions on the Foundation’s mailing list, and even The New […]
[…] Clubhouse: Five Ways to Encourage Women to Edit Wikipedia’. Sue Gardner’s Blog. November 14. https://suegardner.org/2010/11/14/unlocking-the-clubhouse-five-ways-to-encourage-women-to-edit-wikipe… [32] Mandell, Laura. 2013. "Feminist Critique vs. Feminist Production in Digital […]
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Sue, I’m a novice editor on Wikipedia. I’ve been a member since 2011, but I only wrote my debut article in April 2014.
I think inreach within the Wiki community is the best possible place to find more women.
I attempted to write an article about my uncle ‘Rockie Charles’ Merrick in 2012, but couldn’t overcome the difficulties on my own. At the time, I’d started dating my (now) partner Ritchie Swann. He’s a long-time editor on Wikipedia. It was only after we’d entered a serious relationship and I had two years to casually learn more about how Wikipedia works, that I decided to try again.
In the end, it took both of us seated side-by-side at the kitchen table with our respective laptops to finish the article. Later that evening he fixed the wiki page of my FB friend who was being mocked on Wikipedia and he got the page locked so it couldn’t happen again. The article stayed, but hurtful comments about the mans family which couldn’t be properly cited anyway were banned. Ritchie had never heard of my friend and laughed when I asked him to fix the problem. It took several minutes of conversation for him to understand and to take action. The article is now far more professional and balanced.
I think a good number of voices of compassion, balance and reason are probably closer to the Wiki community than most people realise. I don’t think the 91% male editors are all single with no female partners… sisters or daughters.
[…] Clubhouse: Five Ways to Encourage Women to Edit Wikipedia’. Sue Gardner’s Blog. November 14. https://suegardner.org/2010/11/14/unlocking-the-clubhouse-five-ways-to-encourage-women-to-edit-wikipe… [32] Mandell, Laura. 2013. “Feminist Critique vs. Feminist Production in Digital […]