The study about gender on Web 2.0 brought up a topic that I consider to be one of the more relevant issues regarding the equality of women on and offline, the extraordinarily low number of female wikipedia editors. As of 2011 nine out of ten wikipedia editors are male and there are two main reasons that I find this important, both reasons a little cryptic, but never the less important. First of all, it means that there must be a gender bias a dominant information source and secondly it indicates that there is a major difference in the way that men and women participate in Web 2.0.
While I hate to quote an entire paragraph I think that this interview with Sarah Stierch, a Wikimedia Fellow gives several examples as to how this difference effects information on wikipedia: "Whether small things like women’s movies, fashion, makeup, or things that are extremely critical to women’s lives, like abortion, pregnancy, feminism, motherhood, these [articles] are being written by majority men. The arguments taking place on the talk pages are being dominated by men. So the content, the images, etc. are coming from a primary male point of view. That automatically causes a systemic bias, even if all these editors are working in good faith and aiming to be neutral in their contributions."
I think its pretty clear that a gender gap can seriously effect the type of information we receive online, (not to say that there isn't a gap in textbooks, newspapers and journals, but thats another discussion altogether) however I'm more interested in why women don't edit.
This blog Sue Gardner, the Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, is worth a read. It cites comments from women about why they don't edit on the site. Their reasons range from being uncomfortable with the user interface to to disliking the conflicts and arguments that come along with many edits to simply feeling that wikipedia has a misogynistic environment.
So what does this mean for Wikipedia? Ultimately I'm not sure. Historically information has always been pretty male dominant so in context Wikipedia isn't all that different from information we've been receiving all our lives. But it also seems to me that Wikipedia strives to be a revolutionary source of information and I'm going to go ahead and assume that because of this it is important to represent gender equality in their information.
So I ask, what can be done to change this? What are other consequences of a male dominated online culture? Should this be regarded differently than gender inequality in offline society?
The idea of gender equality in online information seems to be very sticky, and imposing, hard to answer and of course essential to gender equality in society overall.
This topic really interests me, and I too, wonder why Wikipedia lacks female editors. Women have seem to found their niche in editing, in the male dominated film industry. Starting off in early film days because it was considered a menial job by men; cutting and sewing, something only a woman could do. Only to prove them wrong in future years, where the editor is a key part in making a great film. So in reference to the age of internet, does the Wikipedia environment present a misogynist viewpoint that editing knowledge or information is just too important and a job for a man? Or did I go off on a tangent about women editors because I am one? Who knows..Either way you bring up a good point and something has to be done to create a more gender equal space for sharing knowledge on the internet. In other words, lets at least, if nothing else, have a woman write the articles on pregnancy, feminism, and motherhood, considering she has a pretty good viewpoint on those topics.
ReplyDeleteThis is really quite fascinating, an issue I had no idea about and hadn’t considered until reading this blog post. I definitely think having a predominantly male editing base is problematic in various ways. As far as how we regulate, I’m uncertain. Internally, Wikipedia could implement some sort of mandatory quota, but then that becomes problematic because barriers tend to exclude information. So it’s a balancing act, do you restrict to increase a diversity of opinion at the possible expense of excluding insight? It may just be the nature of Wikipedia that is the problem. I know from experience reading Wikipedia articles that what can seem like a simple factual statement can be politically loaded simply based on the way one writes the sentence. Like many modern day problems, perhaps it is simply an issue that needs time to work it out. In cases such as these where the best course of action is unclear, the best we can do is to have a dialogue about the problem. Once it is more well known, then it can be corrected.
ReplyDeleteI found this post to be a little puzzling to me. Even though the web may be dominantly run by males I feel like females control more of their social media sites than men. Again, this is just my opinion from what I have seen. To be honest the only reason I made a myspace account to begin with when Myspace was hitting the social media network in a rise was because a female friend of mine at the time created a profile for me. That being said I do wonder why their is a lack of female contribitors for informative websites like Wikipedia. As far as fiixing the problem I agree with Stephen when he point out that regardless of what we decide to do it will be a balancing act especially when putting up regulations to creat more diversity within the social media community.
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