diversity
I think that there are four three major barriers to entry on Wikimedia projects, and I don't feel that they are terribly different for women or men.
1) Usability: If you can't figure out wikicode, you can't edit to any substantive degree. It's as simple as that. Wikicode has grown ever more complex over time, but that's only because it has gained much needed functionality. A combination of two (user selectable) separate editors for Wikimedia projects might solve this, if that were possible: a normal editor, with standard wikicode, and a WYSIWYG editor (shutters), to which new accounts default.
2) Cabal: New users feel like they're being treated as inferiors by established users. They feel that their opinions aren't valued, and that their edits are patrolled. They're right:P. I do this to all newbies I encounter. I try to be polite about it, and I try to AGI, but I don't automatically trust new users (AGI is en.Wikinews's version of AGF. It's different than AGF due to the demanding nature of factchecking news). They usually don't know what they're talking about, and they may well accidentally mis-edit a page and require reversion. That's just the nature of being a newbie.
However, I recall being a newbie, and I didn't like how I was treated. I almost left Wikinews due to the rudeness I encountered, and the sheer, overwhelming weight of the bureaucracy on Wikipedia weighed down on me until I eventually quit editing (beyond minor copyediting). Simply being polite to new users would go a long way to fixing this problem, IMO.
3) I completely forgot: I have no idea what I was planning to write here, but it was awesome, I assure you.
4) Bureaucracy: As mentioned above, Wikimedia's (in particular Wikipedia) level of red tape has become so extreme that you need to sign forms in triplicate before you're allowed to edit any non-backwater page. Whatever happened to "the only rule is that there are no rules"? There are so many rules that new users feel overwhelmed.
Barriers aside, my feeling is that the gender divide is caused almost entirely by two things: 1) women not having as much free time, and 2) women just not seeing the point of participating in Wikimedia projects. These projects are set up with a reward structure similar to those in MMOGs: "increase your online wang" (edit count), "grind XP to level up" (gain admin power), "grind rep" ('win' community discussions *eyeroll*), and "camp spawns" (watch articles of your choice, revert whenever possible in order to show you're good at anti-vandalism). I'm not sure if you're familiar with MMOGs, but they are traditionally geared toward OCD males... and looky there! That's Wikimedia's prime target demographic as well;).
Removing the "grind" from Wikimedia projects, if that's possible, and revamping the reward structure so that it appeals to people that aren't OCD college age males should be our main priorities. I have absolutely no idea how that could be accomplished. For the record MMOG developers are having the same issues. They want to appeal to mass audiences, but are stuck with a total worldwide subscriber base of ~40-50 million due to the OCD nature of their games. Anyone who doesn't tend toward twitchy behaviour finds MMOGs boring in the extreme. The developers would like to change that and expand their audience... but how?
This is all really interesting -- and some of it is totally new to me. I'm going to do more reading on MMOGs -- feel free to point me towards useful stuff if you know any :-)
(Side note but also interesting -- the book CyberChiefs: Autonomy and Authority In Online Tribes, by Mathieu O'Neill. He studies primitivism.com, Daily Kos, Debian and us, and has some interesting observations about gender.)
Wow...I can't believe I'm joining this discussion just now! :P
While I wouldn't disagree that the "grind" really has a lot to do with editors joining (and subsequently staying) on a Wikimedia project, I think it also has a lot to do with how the projects' image, both internally and externally, has changed over the last ten years. In my part of the woods, people look at the projects as simply resources, and that's it. They see no incentive to edit because they think that people will be doing those things for them, and that's the mindset that we're working to change. On the Tagalog Wikipedia, we have an active campaign to encourage anonymous users and casual readers to edit, and though I'm not sure just how successful the campaign is, I can say that at least we get the message across.
At least here, MMORPGs are popular because not only do we make lots of them every year, and not only are they a billion-peso industry because of all the material that are being sold, but because they are capable of 'clicking' with the population. Now the question is how to make Wikimedia 'click'.