Why Women Have No Time For Wikipedia

Andreas Kolbe writes Wikipedia is well known to have a very large gender imbalance, with survey-based estimates of women contributors ranging from 8.5% to around 16%. This is a more extreme gender imbalance than even that of Reddit, the most male-dominated major social media platform, and it has a palpable effect on Wikipedia content. Moreover, Wikipedia editor survey data indicate that only 1 in 50 respondents is a mother – a good proportion of female contributors are in fact minors, with women in their twenties less likely to contribute to Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation efforts to address this "gender gap" have so far remained fruitless. Wikipedia's demographic pattern stands in marked contrast to female-dominated social media sites like Facebook and Pinterest, where women aged 18 to 34 are particularly strongly represented. It indicates that it isn't lack of time or family commitments that keep women from contributing to Wikipedia – women simply find other sites more attractive. Wikipedia's user interface and its culture of anonymity may be among the factors leading women to spend their online time elsewhere.

Comments

Re:Obvious Reason

[aeschinesthesocratic]

Have you edited Wikipedia lately? It's a fucking nightmare of committee-watched articles and instantaneous reversions.

Maybe women just want to put nice things on pinterest instead of arguing about pedantic bullshit all day.

Re:Articles on the elementary education imbalance?

[BobSutan]

Every time you hear about a gender gap in STEM, it's because someone didn't do their homework and are operating from a false premise. The truth is there's no gender imbalance in STEM. This is this is the best kept secret out there: they omit biological _sciences_ from the "STEM" definition because women are an overwhelming majority of those fields. When you add them back in there is. no. gap.

This is all just the result of gender feminists playing games with terminology to benefit their pet projects. It's since taken on it's own life and now people think we need more women in STEM. The REAL gender gap is in education and academia. Men are only about 13% of school teachers and that's got to change if we want our kids to grow up with a balanced view of the genders.