Women's Rights

There are obvious historic and sytems oppressions reasons behind this, but women just don't have as much TIME as men to be on the internet.  There are definitely women (and men) who may not be as interested in surfing the web as their partners, but generally speaking, men have had and continue to have more access to computers, the internet, and time.  Even when women do have access, they have many other responsibilities that take their time, so that they cannot research and contribute to efforts like Wiki.

While I know many people -- and, sadly, many of my students -- flock to Wikipedia for information, I find the site to be pretty worthless and silly. I do my best to drill into my students that they cannot trust any content they find on Wikipedia, but who knows how much of that manages to stick in their fuzzy brains...

I agree that because so many people use Wikipedia we need to make sure the info on there reflects our views, but I cannot bring myself to get involved in contributing to the site because I know any shmuck can write whatever he wants on there, and therefore I have a hard time taking the content seriously enough to care to update it.

Honestly, this is a ridiculous argument. You can't blame men because they edit wikipedia more than women do. You're making an issue out of nothing.

I often use Wikipedia for quick information gathering or for a jumping-off point to deeper research and have, on occasion, considered adding content. What usually stops me is one of two things. Either I don't feel that I know enough about a topic to be comfortable adding information or I am unwilling to put up with the inevitable fights and edit wars that seem to surround Wikipedia's back end.

I had never considered the gender of the users until reading this entry and had, obviously incorrectly (!), assumed that the gender gap was narrower than in more traditional information outlets.

I hope women stop acting like victims and stand up for themselves.  It is wikipedia, there is nothing stopping a woman from posting except herself.

I don't understand what is so difficult.  If women want more input on the internet, then go right ahead.  You are the only one stopping it from happening!

The comments here give the impressing that you are being oppressed.  Come back down to earth.  You are not victims, have some confidence.

I very much doubt as it has been implied in the previous comments that women are discriminated against in wikipedia. First of all the anonymous nature of the site makes it almost impossible to do so. Second I find that in my opinion, these numbers to be representative of people who would edit wikipedia.

To put it simply: who takes the time or cares about editing wikipedia? Geeks who are interested in the internet or wikimedia movement and are well versed in a particular topic of interest. The first people to do so were engineers or computer science majors, which are fields were to this day men outnumber women. If say there is a 20-40% women population in one of these areas it would be logical to assume that an approximate amount of contributions would be done by them.

Again if a small population of women (in comparison to men) care about wikipedia and editing it, they will be heavily outnmbered, and these numbers are consistent with women population in digg.com, slashdot, linux population, your average forum and all other computer-related geek sites. And I very much doubt this is due to male discrimination, systematic or otherwise, I personally do not know many women who would fit the profile that is generally required to be a great wikipedia geek, which is more social and emotional than intellectual, because in wikipedia you cna write about anything.

On another note:
Wikipedia is not as you say about expressing opinions and I personally do not care if the person who submits the information that is read is a man or a woman. The important thing is that it is balanced and impartial and no one gets the credit for writing 'x' pages; everything can be made anonymously and in my opinion should be made anonymously. But again stop treating wikipedia as an editorial, it is not one.

 >Hmm - it seems that we have yet another online example 
 >where women are not feeling very welcome to share their
 >ideas, their voice and their intellect
I'm as much of a feminist as the next person, but i couldn't help but roll my eyes reading this. By this logic, women aren't feeling welcome in the beer drinking community, the muscle-car modding community, or the World of Warcraft Community. Is that because these communities are sexist, exclusive, old-boy-dominated? Could be...  or perhaps women simply aren't as -interested- in these things. Like it or not, boys and girls show interests in different activities at very early ages, and consequently they will trend towards participation in different communities. I'm as much of a feminist as the next person, but i think these sorts of articles hurt the cause more than help it. Let's focus on those places where -real- discrimination lies (which is not the anonymous world of virtual communities).

Let me first start off by saying wikipedia is amazing, secondly there has to be something more important to be worrying about.  Anyone can post on wikipedia, and practically everything is factual.  If an article is changed and it does not match the information that it was refferenced from, it will be changed extemely fast, don't be afraid to try it.

And are you that surprised that more males contribute to this site?  I'm an IT major, and let me tell you, male computer nerds outnumber female computer nerds about 10 to 1, if not more.  So, its only makes sense that more males contribute to the site.  On that note, please find a biased article on wikipedia.  You won't be able to, so is this really a problem that needs to be addressed?

PS- To all those teachers out there that discourage their students from using wikipedia, please stop.  There are a number of references to other articles where the original information was taken from.  So, encourage them to use wiki, but that they need to use and reference the original sites.

agree with most except the "yet another example of how male dominated the internet space has become " sentence. 1) What other examples? 2) why _become_? I'm quite young but 13% seems to be an rather high number. How many women were using the internet in the 90ties? It was a nerdy activity. As nerdy as edit wars. Just recently in the so called "web 2.0 era" when websites became more open, attractive and collaborated, women were more likely to come in contact with the net. Lets look at the gaming scene for instance: thanks to casual gaming plattforms like the Wii the number of playing women increased from year to year.
To sum up: I think your describtion of the present is accurate and your calls for the future correct but the past looked much more dark...

Wikipedia is a open platform where anyone can contribute.  Not only that, but the software that runs it is open source so anyone can create their own new version of wikipedia.  The name Wikipedia itself is unique but the rest is up for grabs.  I am tired of writers insulting women by making them out to be victims.  It's really not my intention to discourage raising awareness of real issues but this just isn't one, so I look forward to more constructive articles in the near future.

To those complaining about women victimizing themselves: you're the only ones saying or implying that here. Jen wrote this blog to point out to women that there are not many of us representing our side of the facts on Wikipedia, and calling us to action to take the time to edit articles when we see something that does not tell the whole story or has missing information, etc.

She did say "women are not feeling very welcome." You're the ones twisting those words into an accusation of victimization. No one is saying men are discriminating against women or attacking them or whatever -- the blog even asks women why they are more involved in the editing/updating process in Wikipedia. By asking the question she is stating she doesn't know what the reason is, but she wants to find out and bring this issue to our attention, so we can stand up for ourselves and do something about it.

So, to those assuming we women are victimizing ourselves... stop projecting. The fact that you assume we're weak or whiny and therefore need or choose to victimize ourselves does not mean that we are doing it.

I'm a woman who occasionally contributes on Wikipedia, and is beyond her 20's. I can confirm that in my experience,  there's a juvenile quality to the war of the edits on Wikipedia that turns me off.  Who has the time, and who wants the agita?  (Men in their 20's, apparently).
This isn't a new phenomenon in online culture, however.  The proven cure is good community moderation.  If the PTB at Wikipedia want to make the space more appealing to a wider body of potential contributors, then that's an investment they may need to make.

I suspect it might be similar the experience that me and my partner have had on Wikipedia - that we've made contributions only to have some (male, straight, classic geek) wiki-troll delete them saying 'that isn't pertinent' when in fact they were, and we had more expertise in that area than the 'moderator' who according to his history just goes around randomly deleting things *he* doesn't like, regardless of genre or expertise.

(And no we weren't puffing our own stuff like a lot of people do behind the scenes, they were on point re: gay history and mashups in my case).

I'm all for moderation in a community where the moderators have some sort of expertise, even if that expertise is only in chairing disputes - but sadly Wikipedia does seem to breed a confrontative sort of delete-happy troll who like that judge that got a thrill from sentencing people to hang, get a thrill from deleting things that don't fit their world view, and then when challenged point at their 'badge' and go through the whole jobsworth routine.

Point is, if you're not that sort of controntation alpha-male mentality, be you queer, female, male, whatever - you're response is probably to go somewhere else.

I think some of the moderators on Wikipedia are part of the problem - and that kind of mentality shift towards co-operation and away from 'edit wars' is a difficult one, but if Wikipedia needs to survive and be more diverse, it needs to be done.

I must admit the bias has been very evident to me, and I have tried very hard to ensure there was at least a feminist gaze in articles I have contributed to, which had been very androcentric. I would do more were it not for the wars described above.

The title of this piece is a case in point, I wrote most of the first page on the History of Feminism and was promptly criticised for even suggesting there was such a thing. All of the criticisms within feminist literature of history suddenly came true - the history of feminism has been the history of the absence of women from history - not because they were not there, but because they were ignored as irrelevant. The critics cleary were not even interested in reading the major sources I provided such as Karen Offen, Nancy Cott and Ann Taylor Allen. 

One comment was particularly telling 'everyone knows that feminism started in the 60s when women burnt their bras' - really? Apart from the fact that they never did that, that wipes out several thosand years of women's contributions to history. Some medical articles were also incredibly positivist and androcentric, such as Female Ejaculation, which excluded all the feminist sources.

So yes we need more women on Wikipedia because its influence is pervasive.  

Thank you for this post, and it is true that we need to participate.  What we need to do is take action and get to the site.  Pronto!

When I read this post the first TRUTH that came to that mind is that when women are not equally participating in historical documentation, women's history is not equally represented.  In relation to that truth, our interpretation is not equally represented.

This is a long-winded example:

So I hopped on Wikipedia to look up what I learned from my scholary studies of the last known female centered Minoan culture of Crete and its Goddess based worship.  There was a mention of this on Minoan culture page.

This then lived on in a Greek myth which demonizes the Goddess worship and Matriachy.  No mention on Wikipedia of this interpretation.  The myth is the Minotaur which was beheaded by a Greek hero (no representation of a Minotaur in Minoan culture, though the symbol of the bull is used in its Goddess worship). The Minotaur lives in a Labrynth (no archeological evidence of the maze. The term was derived from the Labrys which is the Godess symbol and votive found all over Crete excavations.)

Alert!  Female scholars needed!  Wikipedia states that the myth has archeological backed worship in the Minoan culture, which is does not.  It is art history 101 that the bull decapitation is the mythic version of the Greek gods takeover of the bull and labrys symbols of goddess worship...the Greek invasion of Crete. 

Thank you.  Yes, our interpretations need to be on the site.

Arcadia said: [quote]I completely disagree.  While it is true that there clearly *must be* some reason for the incredible discrepancy Jen describes above, it is absolutely well within the realm of credible, logical reasoning to posit the theory that gender discrimination might be a leading cause of a full SEVENTY-FIVE PERCENT difference in male-to-female contributors.

As a journalist and media consultant, I would think Jen has a wealth of experience from which to draw valid conclusions and hypothesis, that at the very least far surpasses what we *accidental bloggers* might encounter on a daily basis. [/quote]
I am not questioning Jen's credentials, but I am simply saying that a hypothesis must be backed by some sort of evidence, rather than simple conjecture. It's just good science/journalism. 
This article makes a presumption with no factual or evidential basis, and while Jen has every right to do so, citing her media credentials is irrelevant if she is going to present a fait accompli.
As someone else wrote - we women don't play world of warcraft much....does that mean that the game is sexist, or that online gaming communities are mysoginistic? Perhaps it does - but equally, perhaps there are other reasons explaining this trend.  
Jen's article itself raises important questions about how we can get more women to participate in online knowledge-generation, but she betrays it all with her comment that "it seems that we have yet another online example where women are not feeling very welcome to share their ideas, their voice and their intellect."
How does Jen jump from the empirical evidence (that 75% of contributers are male) to this? It is simply poor journalism to present such an opinion without even hinting that, perhaps, (shock, horror!) women don't contribute to wikipedia because they're not as interested in doing so. 

Michelle - how are you drawing this conclusion that women aren't interested in editing Wikipedia? I have edited Wikipedia and it surprises me that more women aren't interested. But knowing how the editing & discussion area of Wikipedia is - it can be intimidating to anyone - women included. I'd like to know how we can make it a place where more women are interested in participating, rather than just making an excuse for women's lack of participation as you've done above.

I understand that things like World of Warcraft may market toward male interests - but are you really trying to suggest that history isn't something that women find stimulating? Come on, give your fellow females a little more credit than that.

Also, what else is a hypothesis, if not based on preliminary evidence? Having studied the online environment, I have a good idea of why women participate in certain platforms and why they don't. The interface, the tone of conversation, the cliques that are formed and the topics that are suppored within online forums can make or break a female's participation there. Making sure that a welcoming environment exists for women to utilize - particularly from a site infrastructure standpoint - is key, but not something that I believe was considered by the founders of Wikipedia.  They may not have had gender in mind, but now it seems that we have a bit of a problem given the compelling statistics that would make any business owner stop and think - hmm, why am I losing such a big chunk of the female market share on my site?

Hi Jen,
I'm NOT drawing that conclusion - my point is that, given the lack of evidence, we can't infer WHY it is that women don't edit wikipedia. Perhaps it is indeed because they feel excluded, perhaps it's cos they're not technically proficient enough, perhaps it's because they simply don't want to....we simply don't have any evidence either way. 
Implying that the reason is because women aren't "feeling very welcome to share their ideas, their voice and their intellect" is simply baseless postulating!
You say that you've studied the online environment and therefore have "a good idea of why women participate in certain platforms" and I have no reason to doubt that - but without any empirical evidence your presuppositions are just that - presuppositions. 
Wikipedia's editing section isn't discriminatory against women - it's discriminatory against anyone who lacks a certain measure of internet proficiency. Women, on average, tend to be less IT-savvy than men (and it is THIS that should be your target, not wikipedia itself), which might go some way towards explaining why so many contributers are men. Just did a quick family poll...my older brother is pretty useless with PCs..and surprise surprise, he's never even thought of editing wikipedia. Ditto my mum. I, on the other hand, have edited articles because I am more comfortable with PCs and technology. My sex/gender has nothing to do with it. 

Causation and correlation are two very different beasts, and confusing the two simply weakens your argument.

I'm commenting on this because I seriously think that the victim culture that surrounds much contemporary feminist writing does women a great disservice, since it simply makes it easier for men to dismiss gender inequalities if women see discrimination where there isn't any. It is incredibly frustrating when mysoginists use examples of over-zealous feminists to brush aside talk of gender discrimination. 
Let's not miss the wood for the trees! 

Sooo... if it matters so much, why are you here moaning about it instead of off contributing?

Men arent going to stop submitting so you can catch up, so the ball is in your court.

I think more statistics are needed. For example, it could be possible that women and men are contributing to the large, popular articles in equal numbers, but men are out-numbering women in writing obsessively detailed articles about areas of particular interest. For example, Wikipedia has dozens of articles dedicated to various chicken breeds. eg. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sebright_(chicken)

You might be right I'm not convinced there's been enough evidence presented to draw any meaningful conclusions.

I'm a mid-twenties male who works in IT and I think it's just that more guys are obsessive about technology. Not to say that there are not exceptions to the rule because I have met women who are hardcore techies but they are heavily outnumbered. When mainstream academia stops rejecting wikipedia I'll bet there will be more female contributors since there are more women than men pursuing higher education these days.

You don't need to register to use the site, and you don't need to specify your gender when you register to edit the site. All you need is an email address, user name and password. http://tinyurl.com/57kydu

We should bear in mind that these statistics are from a survey. The survey size was reasonable, though tiny compared with the overall Wikipedia audience. But it was still a survey and the people who fill in these surveys are self-selecting to a certain extent.

Also bear in mind that Wikipedia is international and the gender divide may be very different in different countries.

What matters just as much is the relevance of the articles to women's needs and whether their content reflects a balanced gendered perspective, or at least provides both.

I think we should give Jenn a big thank you for calling our attention to this. A very large gender gap in any facet of media that is very commonly used for information is a serious issue.  One thing we can all agree on is that it should change.

I am finding the "tech" argument running through this comment thread as an explanation disturbing.  There is nothing more inherantly technological about contributing to Wikipedia than moderating a Facebook group.

Something else has been overlooked to cause a gap this big and Jenn definately has cause to point that out.  Wikipedia may not be considered a credible source, but it points to credible sources.  The gender gap will interrupt the balance in that traffic as well.  

Given the high numbers of women who work as librarians, teachers, researchers, writers and other not-very-well-paid professions that value accuracy, it doesn't suprise me in the least that women don't consider Wikipedia a worthy volunteer project. Why waste your free time doing uncompensated, uncredited work on something so noncredible when there are so many more meaningful things you could be doing?

However, I question the accuracy of the numbers themselves, which may be no more credible than Wikipedia itself. You don't have to register to edit Wikipedia. You don't have to supply your gender or any personal information at all. So we're only looking at what those people who bothered to fill out a survey said about themselves.

Glad to see I'm not the only person who thinks that more research is needed before drawing conclusions! 
Kendra - the tech argument is a very valid one. Wikipedia's editing interface simply isn't all that user-friendly to the unitiated - it certainly isn't as welcoming as facebook's, that's for sure. 
But, as you said, thank you Jen for bringing this up. I might not agree with your train of thought, but there's no doubting your commitment :) 

Before accepting these figures as Gospel, I would check them out. My belief is it could a higher ratio. As an advocate against Poverty, and homelessness I check out everything before I believe it.

Being a woman I wrote to get the method of the poverty level changed. Who ever wrote it was passing on wishes as fact. They said that poverty levels take account for all the basics a person needs. And that is what our current poverty level did.
Under the name of Mollie Orshansky the statistian who developed the poverty level ONLY Food was considered for the poverty level.
Finally, after going through a couple level of review, it was changed to reflect reality.

Yes the media is run by the good ol boys.

I am a person who has joined 10 sites and do not how to get back on. I dont know where to say this.  As you Jen seem to respond to the bloggers perhapsy ou can tell me how to fix my site Here. My site at change.org is goofy. It says I have 14 invitations but when I click on such it says you have NO invites. There has also been a thing about a mirror error.

Posting IS the only thing i can figure out how to do. Anyone out there with tips?

I was originally incensed by this post's title "Men Re-Write History and Women Watch It Happen"...but then, I saw that Jen reported that 75% of Wiki posts are made by men, making it a non-issue.

Apparently men are the major contributors to Wikipedia. Whoop-De-Do. If there was some sort of 'gender-blocking' technology in use at Wikipedia where women were kept from contributing to the site, this would be an issue. But there isn't. Women could contribute to Wikipedia whenever they choose (and perhaps some are), but they're doing it less than men are. Oh well. Feel free to jump in there any time, ladies. 

If Jen wanted to write something truly interesting and accurate, she'd write a post entitled "Men Die In Iraq and Women Watch It Happen".

I'm unconvinced of the exigency of bringing a semi-literate online encyclopedia under the microscope of feminist theory. It may be a little "cartoonish" to manufacture this kind of outrage. But then again, I'm not against a good cartoon.