diversity

Edited by another user.
Last edit: 21:09, 15 June 2010

I think you're right it is still applicable. I also think the face to face stuff is important as well. With no scientific (or for that matter very unscientific) studies I do feel that the women who are in the community tend to value "personal" interaction more. Whether that's meetups, skype, IRC or just personal email conversations I feel they like to understand a bit more about the people they are working with then the men do.

The combination of online work with some offline interaction (even rarely) can increase the trust and respect level greatly. Of course that's speaking very broadly and there are obvious exceptions, as a man for example I highly prefer a lot of those personal connections as well. I know you had a post on Foundation-l... oh a month or so ago about how you had met one of the commentators people thought was being rude/abusive and therefore looked at him a different way because you had seen him to be much less so in person. I think it is things like that that are great examples. I know that I felt much more connected to the community after my first meetup and I think more interaction like that could be good both for women and men. Editing to replace sig, edited logged out

Jamesofur 21:04, 15 June 2010 (UTC)21:02, 15 June 2010

Thanks Jamesofur; I agree with you.

And it's funny -- I wouldn't necessarily say that the women currently active on Wikimedia are particularly representative of their gender. (I hope that in saying that, I am being offensive to neither the women on Wikimedia, nor women in general ;-)

I do think it's possible that --even so--- some of them may, sometimes, display gender characteristics that are overrepresented among women generally -- e.g., as you say. they may be better at personal interaction. But I don't think we can assume they are generally representative of their gender.

Which is totally fine. In my view, the women active on Wikimedia today are in a similar position to the women who were starting to break through corporate glass ceilings in the eighties. (My mother was one of those --she was the first female principal in her public school board--, and I've worked with plenty of them -- they were all one generation ahead of me, so they were typically my bosses and sometimes mentors.)

There were a couple of things about those women that seemed to me to be characteristic // common to them all.

1) They weren't representative of 'typical' women. It's hard to define or even imagine what a typical woman is, but regardless, by definition, those early pathbreakers were unusual. For many, that meant they were unusually smart or dedicated or focused. (One of them, the first female mayor of a major Canadian city, had this line: "Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily, this is not difficult." Ha ha.) And some of them had characteristics that made them more-easily-integrated into corporate-male-majority circles, relative to more gender-typical women. For example, they might have a personal style that tended more towards authoritative than warm.... they might be more inclined to show anger rather than fear ..... they might tend to be less harmony-focused and less conflict-averse ..... they might like sports, or pretend to like sports, etc. etc. etc.

Similarly, I would say the women currently active on Wikimedia might overrepresent "typical Wikimedian" characteristics, more-so than "typically female" characteristics.

2) Those pathbreaking women in the eighties were often expected to represent all women and women's interests, which many of them _really_didn't want to do. They wanted to be perceived and evaluated based on their unique skills and characteristics and qualities. But because there were so few of them, they were often expected to represent all women, which many of them resented. (The same is true for any 'diversity' characteristic, of course: at the CBC for example, journalists from visible minority backgrounds often struggled with expectations that they would have special insight into their community-of-ethnic-origin -- which many did not have, and did not want to develop.) It was complicated: they wanted more women around in part so they would themselves be normalized... but they did not necessarily want to make increasing-female-representation their own focus of work.

I think the same thing is true, to some extent, for women on Wikimedia. Probably most would be uncomfortable speaking on behalf of 'all women,' and I expect that many of them would be happy to have a large volume of female participation in the projects, because it would free them to be 'just a person,' rather than 'unusual due to gender.' Free software communities talk a fair bit about this issue --- for example, in this classic essay by Val Henson here: http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Encourage-Women-Linux-HOWTO/

I am not disagreeing with anything you said, just commenting a little -- I will probably stop banging on about gender here soon, but I do find these issues really interesting :-)

Sue Gardner20:08, 16 June 2010

I would really love for someone to do a true systematic study of motivations and barriers for both male and female contributors. I know that Wikisym this year is talking about having a meeting about researching Wikipedia; maybe I can find an ethnographer or something that I can really push towards this.  :-)

~Philippe (WMF)20:27, 16 June 2010

Yeah, I would love that too. (And I am always in favour of research.) But honestly, there is a lot that's already well known and documented -- this is in no way a unique problem, and our circumstances WRT gender aren't that unusual. For example, there's lots of overlap with open source communities challenges, and lots of overlap with females-in-technology challenges generally.

Kirrily Robert's done lots of good writing, as have other LinuxChix and WikiChix people.

Some semi-random interesting reading.....

I think we need to begin acting on what we know, and expanding some of the experiments that have already begun. Lots of it is obvious work, it just needs some focused attention :-)

Sue Gardner21:53, 16 June 2010

Aye I agree, more research (especially wiki oriented) would be great. All I basically have it my own uninformed mind ramblings :)

Thank you for the links, starting to work through them now but very interesting it really is an interesting issue but I think it is the time to look at it and I feel there have to be ways to help it along in a more diverse direction and that is by far the biggest thing since there is definitely economies of scale making it easier as we go.

Jamesofur05:33, 18 June 2010