Gender inequity at Wikipedia

There's a fairly interesting discussion (basically, four op-ed columns on the same topic) over at the New York Times regarding gender inequity within the Wikipedia community. According to the Times, fewer than 15% of Wikipedia contributors are female, a staggeringly low figure. The question posed in the discussion is why?

There are a couple of interesting answers, which I'll excerpt below. From Carnegie Mellon professor Justine Cassell:

From the inside... Wikipedia may feel like a fight to get one’s voice heard. One gets a sense of this insider view from looking at the “talk page” of many articles, which rather than seeming like collaborations around the construction of knowledge, are full of descriptions of “edit-warring” — where successive editors try to cancel each others’ contributions out — and bitter, contentious arguments about the accuracy of conflicting points of view. Flickr users don’t remove each others’ photos. Youtube videos inspire passionate debate, but one’s contributions are not erased.

Despite Wikipedia’s stated principle of the need to maintain a neutral point of view, the reality is that it is not enough to “know something” about friendship bracelets or “Sex and the City.” To have one’s words listened to on Wikipedia, often one must have to debate, defend, and insist that one’s point of view is the only valid one.

There is, therefore, a certain disparity between the public goals of Wikipedia — to make all knowledge available to all people through a social and collaborative process of knowledge construction -- and the private practices of Wikipedia, where one truth may have to be defended against opposing points of view, and one’s words may need to be protected against others who seek to wipe them out.

Her take, then, is that many women shy away from the chest-thumping and competitive nature that seems to dominate the Wikipedia culture. Along a similar line of reasoning, author Joseph M. Reagle opines that:

First, a culture of hacker elitism can be unappealing to those unable or unwilling to hew to the stereotypical features of the hacker (i.e., a singular, narrow focus; argumentative style; and geek image). Also, the openness of such communities means that a minority of high-conflict members (including, for example, a misogynist or an Internet troll) can have a disproportionate effect on the tone and dynamics of the community.

Finally, the ideology and rhetoric of freedom and openness can then be used (a) to suppress concerns about inappropriate or offensive speech as "censorship" and (b) to rationalize low female participation as simply a matter of their personal preference and choice.

I think these communities are undergoing some difficult but necessary growing pains. As "locker-room" type behavior is challenged (e.g., inappropriate images in conference presentations and sexist jokes), I hope this will make way for more inclusiveness and good faith collaboration -- something which Wikipedia has many great examples of already.

I think there's some fair points in Reagle's analysis. Wikipedia is, in many ways, like an overgrown "Comments" section of a blog. Spend enough time trolling the comments sections of blogs, and it's easy to be turned off by the overwhelmingly crass nature of the "conversation"--in no small part aided by the anonymity (whether real or perceived) of blog commenting. At the risk of sparking a gender war of my own here, I'd say that it's no small leap to assume that women--on the whole--could be more sensitive to this type of "locker room" behavior than men would be.

But I also think there's a missing variable here, one that the other two Times debaters also miss. This Times item from 2008 describes at length the factors behind the significant lack of women who choose to major in (or specialize in, or pursue careers in) computer science. Frankly, the world of I.T.--and by extension the internet itself--tends to be dominated by men. They are more comfortable on the whole designing, editing, and contributing to tech-heavy forums, of which Wikipedia is essentially one.

The factors for this disparity aren't particularly well understood, but discussing and analyzing them is essential to understanding and unlocking the puzzle of gender inequity at Wikipedia. I was surprised to see no mention of this disparity in the Times debate, and I think that the discussion therefore suffers. The most famous and successful internet sites (Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, Amazon, YouTube, Twitter, eBay), not to mention broader technology companies (Microsoft, Apple, Dell, Hewlett-Packard) were unanimously founded by men, and there are few if any examples of technological companies founded--or even managed--by women. This dynamic stands in stark contrast to many other areas of business and industry--sure, gender inequity exists elsewhere, but rarely to such a drastic degree.

I think this is the real reason behind the male-centric nature of Wikipedia content creation. For whatever reason, women are reluctant to dive into the guts of the technology they use--perhaps they are being discriminated against, perhaps there are cultural explanations, and perhaps there are...genetic explanations (how you doin', Larry Summers). The only certainty is that to understand Wikipedia, we need to start at a much higher level, and try to decipher the dynamic that drives technological innovation in our country and the world.

[New York Times]