Re: [Gendergap] Why Women Have No Time For Wikipedia (WPO article)
The post is currently on the Slashdot front page. There are over 300 comments to date, including a handful from current and former female Wikipedians (as well as much dross). http://news.slashdot.org/story/14/08/28/207240/why-women-have-no-time-for-wikipedia If you're prepared to wade through the discussion, elect to see all posts, including the downvoted ones, as otherwise you'll miss some of the more worthwhile ones. On Thu, Aug 28, 2014 at 1:54 AM, Andreas Kolbe jayen...@gmail.com wrote: Hi Marielle, On Wed, Aug 27, 2014 at 9:18 PM, Marielle Volz marielle.v...@gmail.com wrote: Thanks for the response Andreas. I've updated with the 8.5% source. I have updated my text in line with your comments, and added an author's note acknowledging your input. Best regards, Andreas ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Why Women Have No Time For Wikipedia (WPO article)
The math behind that little statistic was so terrible I had to write a blog post about it. http://blog.mvolz.com/2014/08/what-percentage-of-wikipedia-editors-are-mums/ First off, in their blog post, Andreas Collida multiply the percentage of contributor respondents who were women (12.64%) by the percentage of all respondents (contributor and reader, male and female) who were parents- 14.72%- while seemingly missing that the study in fact provided a breakdown of this: 13.7% of all female respondents were parents. (15.1% of the male respondents were). Secondly, Andreas Collida cherry pick a lower bound number for women contributors (8.5%) (source unkown) and presented the number from the survey (12.64%) as an upper bound. A literature search gave me an upper bound of 16.1% from Hill Shaw. Furthermore, the source Andreas Collida used contained biased statistics. The original WMF/UNU-MERIT report had no methods section and didn’t control for sampling bias. The Hill Shaw paper controls for sample bias based on a survey by Pew, which used better sampling methods. Hill Shaw tried to control for the survey’s selection bias and found that they “estimate that females, married people, and individuals with children were underrepresented in the WMF/UNU-MERIT sample while immigrants and students were overrepresented.” This means that the two statistics Andreas Collida chose to multiply together; female editors/contributors and males and females with children- were *both* underestimates in the WMF/UNU-MERIT survey. Hill Shaw provide the adjusted numbers for these accordingly; they estimate that 16.1% of contributors (as opposed to 12.64%) are female, and that 25.3% have children. We can perform a similar analysis as Andreas Collida using those adjusted numbers by multiplying them, a result of about 4.1%- more than double their highest estimate. Of course, this number is also flawed; we don’t have the actual breakdown of what percentage of female contributors have children, and instead are multiplying aggregate numbers. A better estimate could be obtained by redoing Hill Shaw‘s analysis on the raw dataset. On Tue, Aug 26, 2014 at 9:14 PM, Tim Davenport shoehu...@gmail.com wrote: There is a new blog post up on Wikipedia-criticism site Wikipediocracy that should be of interest to this list. Andreas Kolbe with Nathalie Collida, Why Women Have No Time For Wikipedia: Thoughts on the Online Encyclopedia's Gender Imbalance. http://wikipediocracy.com/2014/08/26/why-women-have-no-time-for-wikipedia/ One interesting assertion made by the authors in their lengthy essay is that fewer than 1 in 50 WP contributors is a mother: It is sometimes argued that women simply have less time to contribute to Wikipedia, due to family commitments. This is a fallacy. Firstly, the United Nations University survey found that only 33.29% of respondents had a partner, and only 14.72% had children. The difference between readers and contributors was negligible here, and the survey report did not indicate any difference in these percentages for male and female respondents. It is patently obvious that girls and women in the age groups that are most strongly represented in Wikipedia’s demographics typically do not yet have families of their own. Their lack of participation is unrelated to their being bogged down by family responsibilities. Of course, these figures also tell us something else: if only 14.72% of contributors have children, and the percentage of female contributors lies somewhere between 8.5% and 12.64%, then it looks like only 1.25%–1.86% of Wikipedia contributors are mothers. That is less than 1 in 50. Tim Davenport Carrite on WP /// Randy from Boise on WPO ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Why Women Have No Time For Wikipedia (WPO article)
Hi Marielle, Thanks for your comments, and for pointing out that one of the more detailed reports from the UNU survey, i.e. https://web.archive.org/web/20130129042156/http://www.wikipediasurvey.org/docs/Wikipedia_Age_Gender_30March%202010-FINAL-3.pdf did break down the number of contributors with children according to gender (I took my figures from the overview). I'll add a corresponding correction to our post later. However, the figure given there, 13.7%, is not very different from the overall average of 14.72%. In fact, it is *lower*, and thus using the combined figure I would actually have slightly *overestimated* the percentage of mothers. The source for the 8.5% figure is of course linked in the article. It is the Wikimedia Foundation's own April 2011 survey. The link is https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Editor_Survey_Report_-_April_2011.pdfpage=3 The quote (Our editing community continues to suffer from a lack of women editors. The survey provided an even starker view of this than previous studies (only 8.5% of editors are women).) was a verbatim from page 3 of the WMF report. I will have to look into Hill Shaw, but would note that the Wikimedia Foundation itself reported the figures from the UNU survey as they stood (see e.g. p. 8 of the February 2011 Strategic Plan: According to the study, over 86% of contributors were male). Best, Andreas On Wed, Aug 27, 2014 at 4:52 PM, Marielle Volz marielle.v...@gmail.com wrote: The math behind that little statistic was so terrible I had to write a blog post about it. http://blog.mvolz.com/2014/08/what-percentage-of-wikipedia-editors-are-mums/ First off, in their blog post, Andreas Collida multiply the percentage of contributor respondents who were women (12.64%) by the percentage of all respondents (contributor and reader, male and female) who were parents- 14.72%- while seemingly missing that the study in fact provided a breakdown of this: 13.7% of all female respondents were parents. (15.1% of the male respondents were). Secondly, Andreas Collida cherry pick a lower bound number for women contributors (8.5%) (source unkown) and presented the number from the survey (12.64%) as an upper bound. A literature search gave me an upper bound of 16.1% from Hill Shaw. Furthermore, the source Andreas Collida used contained biased statistics. The original WMF/UNU-MERIT report had no methods section and didn’t control for sampling bias. The Hill Shaw paper controls for sample bias based on a survey by Pew, which used better sampling methods. Hill Shaw tried to control for the survey’s selection bias and found that they “estimate that females, married people, and individuals with children were underrepresented in the WMF/UNU-MERIT sample while immigrants and students were overrepresented.” This means that the two statistics Andreas Collida chose to multiply together; female editors/contributors and males and females with children- were *both* underestimates in the WMF/UNU-MERIT survey. Hill Shaw provide the adjusted numbers for these accordingly; they estimate that 16.1% of contributors (as opposed to 12.64%) are female, and that 25.3% have children. We can perform a similar analysis as Andreas Collida using those adjusted numbers by multiplying them, a result of about 4.1%- more than double their highest estimate. Of course, this number is also flawed; we don’t have the actual breakdown of what percentage of female contributors have children, and instead are multiplying aggregate numbers. A better estimate could be obtained by redoing Hill Shaw‘s analysis on the raw dataset. On Tue, Aug 26, 2014 at 9:14 PM, Tim Davenport shoehu...@gmail.com wrote: There is a new blog post up on Wikipedia-criticism site Wikipediocracy that should be of interest to this list. Andreas Kolbe with Nathalie Collida, Why Women Have No Time For Wikipedia: Thoughts on the Online Encyclopedia's Gender Imbalance. http://wikipediocracy.com/2014/08/26/why-women-have-no-time-for-wikipedia/ One interesting assertion made by the authors in their lengthy essay is that fewer than 1 in 50 WP contributors is a mother: It is sometimes argued that women simply have less time to contribute to Wikipedia, due to family commitments. This is a fallacy. Firstly, the United Nations University survey found that only 33.29% of respondents had a partner, and only 14.72% had children. The difference between readers and contributors was negligible here, and the survey report did not indicate any difference in these percentages for male and female respondents. It is patently obvious that girls and women in the age groups that are most strongly represented in Wikipedia’s demographics typically do not yet have families of their own. Their lack of participation is unrelated to their being bogged down by family responsibilities. Of course, these figures also tell us something else:
Re: [Gendergap] Why Women Have No Time For Wikipedia (WPO article)
On Wed, Aug 27, 2014 at 12:22 PM, Andreas Kolbe jayen...@gmail.com wrote: I will have to look into Hill Shaw, but would note that the Wikimedia Foundation itself reported the figures from the UNU survey as they stood (see e.g. p. 8 of the February 2011 Strategic Plan: According to the study, over 86% of contributors were male). NB., that was before the Hill Shaw paper was published, which was 2013 :) Hill Shaw is *probably* the best estimate of the gendergap we have so far, but everyone -- including the WMF and the researchers involved -- knows that the data can be improved. And hopefully it will be, with future editor surveys and more research! -- phoebe ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Why Women Have No Time For Wikipedia (WPO article)
Thanks Phoebe. What actually happened to the April 2012 survey? I mentioned that the figures were never released – all I could find was some Wikimania 2013 slides John Vandenberg posted on Facebook, which did not include gender stats, and to my knowledge there was neither a report nor a dump (see links in the post; I noted that people kept asking about it on the relevant Meta talk page, and then it seemed to peter out). https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Wikipedia_Editor_Survey_2012#Results https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_talk:Wikipedia_Editor_Survey_2012#How_long Do you have access to the gender demographics results, and if so, could you share them? Best, Andreas On Wed, Aug 27, 2014 at 8:42 PM, phoebe ayers phoebe.w...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Aug 27, 2014 at 12:22 PM, Andreas Kolbe jayen...@gmail.com wrote: I will have to look into Hill Shaw, but would note that the Wikimedia Foundation itself reported the figures from the UNU survey as they stood (see e.g. p. 8 of the February 2011 Strategic Plan: According to the study, over 86% of contributors were male). NB., that was before the Hill Shaw paper was published, which was 2013 :) Hill Shaw is *probably* the best estimate of the gendergap we have so far, but everyone -- including the WMF and the researchers involved -- knows that the data can be improved. And hopefully it will be, with future editor surveys and more research! -- phoebe ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Why Women Have No Time For Wikipedia (WPO article)
Hi Marielle, On Wed, Aug 27, 2014 at 9:18 PM, Marielle Volz marielle.v...@gmail.com wrote: Thanks for the response Andreas. I've updated with the 8.5% source. I have updated my text in line with your comments, and added an author's note acknowledging your input. Best regards, Andreas ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap