Different Strokes for Different Genders
Susan Herring, professor of information sciences and linguistics at Indiana University, commented in The New York Times on the issue of Wikipedia authors being mostly men. Her long time research concentration is the difference in communication on the internet, and she has concluded women tend to post factual information when they post, or phrase their opinions as suggestions, whereas men post their opinions as if they were facts.
But she was most interested in the percent of commenters, why there was such a gender asymmetry. Herring first had hypothesized maybe women were too busy or not very interested in the topics on the online discussion she studied to post. But neither of these turned out to be true.
Instead, she established that the difference stemmed from the tone of the list. In her words, "Whereas men tended to say that they found the "slings and arrows" that list members posted "entertaining" (as long as they weren't directed at them), women reported that the antagonistic exchanges made them want to unsubscribe from the list. One women said it made her want to drop out of the field of linguistics altogether."
Herring notes that while Wikipedia entries are not contentious, the pages where issues about what specifics to post are thrashed out can be quite confrontational. I notice one of our commenters on the Wikipedia issue brought this out as well. Although Herring notes Wikipedia tries to be neutral, she suggests that women might contribute more if it were possible to show partiality to one side, with attribution, since women like to know and trust those they rely on for facts.
cheers,
Laura
What do you think?
A Women would still not contribute even if they could take sides, as long as the behind the scenes warfare persists
B Women would be more likely to contribute with partiality and attribution
C I can't decide, although it does seem worth finding a way to increase women's participation
D I don't really care
I don't want to be rude, but I think D is the answer. Why cares? We'd ideally like women's topics and voices, but if they make it impossible, maybe a woman will found a wompedia and compete for women's clicks.
I lean towards B here. I find that I can listen to either Fox or MSNBC because I know in advance what I'll find. Maybe this pretense of neutrality is a problem, just a bone for the dogs to contend over.
Hi exCS and Melissa,
The head of Wikipedia is a woman, who was quoted in the article in NYT. I hope she can do something to help. She doesn't sound like she enjoys confrontation, ironically enough.
cheers,
Laura
It's funny, Laura, I find that even though I could pick a new alias each time, I like using the one I started a while ago. It's like, I want to have you perceive me as a continuing person, but not in person.
For this A definitely. It is so messed up that the writers get bombed with all kinds of cyber flak. Very CS-like, I recognize the phenomenon. Maybe if women waded in and shot back, the bullets would slack off. I didn't wait around to find out, just opted out. I think Wikipedia will be the loser, not having a lot of the opinions and values of women, unless they can make this problem disappear.
I think H is right. There's no percentage in contributing if your ideas will simply disappear. I wonder too if gender were hidden if it would matter. In blogging, it seems to be important. I don't know about SecondLife, haven't had time to look it over. MKS
Interesting. I found another article by a woman who analyzed the behind the scenes Wikipedia and she came to the same conclusion, that's what deters women, at least in part. Sounds like some of us tried it an decided it was NOT user friendly.
cheers,
Laura
I agree with 'XX' about A.
In 'Women who run with the wolves," the author says women want a magnum opus before they're ready to publish, and I certainly know that's a problem for me with publishing, despite having 100+ pubs. A male colleague told me recently that paper-writing was easy for him after the first 100, but that hasn't worked for me.
I wrote a 'stub' for wikipedia once that was deleted the next time I checked, even tho there was still no article for the topic of my 'stub'. That didn't encourage me to contribute. And there was a graph in wikipedia showing women had lower IQ's than men; I don't know if it's still there. My brother was surprised that I'd be bothered by such a thing, given the success of girls and women in school and college.
Do you suppose women are more willing to post on a site if everyone's gender is unknown? We tend to hide our identities already in most online posts.
What's the ratio of women to men characters in SecondLife.com?
I think I'm for A here. I don't think women will go tooth and nail for their facts due to lack of confidence in the fact of men's bombast. Especially on a site that doesn't especially give them a positive boost in credit in academia.
