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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.
Men in general seem to have less tolerance for what they perceive as error and a greater willingness to fight to correct error.
That's not the say that men are more often correct than are women. They just seem more eager to do battle, even if it is from behind a keyboard.
Anyone that's been involved in an edit war of wikipedia knows that the winner is often isn't the one with the best grasp of the facts, but it's the one least willing to give up the fight.
It is pretty easy to date the why. In 2006 there was a thing called the Userbox wars. There isn't a good page on wikipedia about this. Prior to 2006 Wikipedia user pages were sort of like myspace pages for wikipedia editors. They had lots of personal information and people chatted. Jimmy Wales wanted userspace to be about the encyclopedia. At the same time he didn't want mass deletions. There were mass deletions and the this wasn't easily reversed. The tone changed. This was one of the big steps towards the deletionists winning control of Wikipedia entirely. But if you want to know when the gender's changed this was a crucial moment.
Of course the deletionists winning even more battles probably didn't help
Links:
A few statements on Userboxes but not enough to understand what happened: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
What "deletionists" are and what Wikipedia was like before them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
How the percentages look like for normal, old-school encyclopedias? I know that for example in case of school textbooks gender ratio might be even skewed towards woman (at least in my country) - which is probably a side effect of majority of teachers being woman (83%). But encyclopedias? I cannot find any data on data - but looking at chief editors of Brittanica, all of them were man...
I think that problem lies somewhere before age of 25. At some point during early education, there is some kind of bias/peer pressure/whatever which makes woman being interested in other things. Putting Hello Kitty pictures in background of wikipedia is not going to help afterwards ;)
Interesting read! After reading through all of the comments here, my take on this has been that relative to something like facebook, neither men nor women in general like editing wikipedia. I'm pulling statistics from different years, but I think this is roughly in the right ballpark:
World Population (2010):
Female: ~3.42 Billion
Male: ~3.48 Billion
Total: ~6.9 Billion
Active facebook users (2009,2014):
Female/Male ratio: ~1:1.35
Total: ~1.28 Billion
Female: ~0.74 Billion
Male: ~0.54 Billion
% of all females actively using facebook: ~22%
% of all males actively using facebook: ~16%
Active wikipedia users (2014):
Female/Male ratio: ~12:100 (rough center of survey according to article)
Total: 0.000131 Billion
Female: 0.0000157 Billion
Male: 0.00011528 Billion
% of all females actively editing wikipedia: 0.0004%
% of all males actively editing wikipedia: 0.0033%
So when you get down to it, there just happens to be a very slightly larger fraction of the male population that is willing to invest their time in Wikipedia. When by and large, people in general don't do it, I think it's hard to make any kind of generalization about whether or not there are specific barriers for either men or women. The bigger trend imho is that there are barriers for everyone.