Women at the Top Blog

The blogosphere has been humming for the past few weeks following Noam Cohen’s piece in The New York Times discussing the fact that just 13 per cent of Wikipedia contributors are women.

The figures were taken from a joint study commissioned by the Wikimedia Foundation (Wikipedia’s parent) and undertaken by the United Nations University and Maastricht University about a year ago.

The research found that 87 per cent of contributors to the 17m-and-counting entries were male, in their mid-20s and most likely to be graduates in science, technology, engineering or maths.

Cohen appears to justify the “gender gap”, arguing that it simply reflects “the traditions of the computer world and an obsessive, fact-loving realm that is dominated by men and, some say, uncomfortable for women”.

Joseph Reagle argues in his book Good Faith Collaboration: the Culture of Wikipedia that early contributors to the site shared “many characteristics with the hard-driving hacker crowd”. He suggests women hold back from contributing to the site because they are “less willing to assert their opinions in public”.

Jane Margolis, co-author of Unlocking the Clubhouse, a book on sexism in computer science, says Wikipedia is experiencing the same problems as the offline world, where women are less willing to assert their opinions in public: “In almost every space, who are the authorities, the politicians, writers for op-ed pages?”

Whatever the underlying causes for the gender imbalance, there is an argument that it matters. Sue Gardner, executive director at Wikimedia, has set a goal to increase the number of women editors to 25 per cent by 2015.

She argues that because Wikipedia’s strength is in its self-regulating accumulation of knowledge from multiple sources, the site must draw contributions from as wide a base as possible.

Gardner does not explain how she will meet this goal. One assumes not via quotas.