Misplaced Pages

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Gender bias is one of the criticisms of Misplaced Pages. The concern is related to the fact that between 87% and 91% of Misplaced Pages editors are male. There have been attempts to narrow the gender gap among Misplaced Pages editors and administrators.

Research findings

Misplaced Pages has been criticized by some academics and journalists for having only 9% to 13% female contributors and for having fewer and less extensive articles about women or topics important to women.

In 2010, United Nations University and UNU-MERIT jointly presented an overview of the results of the first global Misplaced Pages survey. A January 30, 2011, New York Times article cited this Wikimedia Foundation collaboration, which found that fewer than 13% of contributors to Misplaced Pages are women. Sue Gardner, then executive director of the foundation, said that increasing diversity was about making the encyclopedia "as good as it could be." Factors the article cited as possibly discouraging women from editing included the "obsessive fact-loving realm", associations with the "hard-driving hacker crowd," and the necessity to be "open to very difficult, high-conflict people, even misogynists."

In February 2011, the Times followed up with a series of opinions on the subject under the banner, "Where Are the Women in Misplaced Pages?" Susan C. Herring, a professor of information science and linguistics, said that she was not surprised by the Misplaced Pages contributors gender gap. She said that the often contentious nature of Misplaced Pages article "talk" pages, where article content is discussed, is unappealing to many women, "if not outright intimidating." Joseph M. Reagle reacted similarly, saying that the combination of a "culture of hacker elitism," combined with the disproportionate effect of high-conflict members (a minority) on the community atmosphere, can make it unappealing. He said, "the ideology and rhetoric of freedom and openness can then be used (a) to suppress concerns about inappropriate or offensive speech as "censorship" and (b) to rationalize low female participation as simply a matter of their personal preference and choice." Justine Cassell said that although women are as knowledgeable as men, and as able to defend their point of view, "it is still the case in American society that debate, contention, and vigorous defense of one’s position is often still seen as a male stance, and women’s use of these speech styles can call forth negative evaluations."

The International Journal of Communication published research by Reagle and Lauren Rhue that found Misplaced Pages has more detail in articles about men, with the rate of coverage of females on average, around 100 words less than males on selected biographical articles.

In April 2011, the Wikimedia Foundation conducted its first semi-annual Misplaced Pages survey. It suggested that only 9% of Misplaced Pages editors are women. It also reported, "Contrary to the perception of some, our data shows that very few women editors feel like they have been harassed, and very few feel Misplaced Pages is a sexualized environment." However, an October 2011 paper at the International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration suggested that Misplaced Pages may have "... a culture that may be resistant to female participation."

Causes

Besides Western academic bias, causes of the gender bias on Misplaced Pages have been found to be failure to attract and retain female editors, thereby losing the "female voice" in content disputes or in content creation. Gardner provides nine reasons, offered by female Misplaced Pages editors, as to why this is the case. These include:

1. a lack of user-friendliness in the editing interface;
2. not having enough free time;
3. lack of self-confidence;
4. aversion to conflict and a disinterest in participating in lengthy edit wars;
5. belief that their contributions will be changed or deleted;
6. some find its overall atmosphere misogynist;
7. Misplaced Pages culture is sexual in ways they find off-putting;
8. being addressed as male is off-putting to women whose primary language has grammatical gender;
9. fewer opportunities than other sites for social relationships and a welcoming tone.

Lam et al. suggest that there may be a culture which is non-inclusive of women on Misplaced Pages, which may be due to some suggestions that less than 25% of Misplaced Pages readers are female, a disparity in male-to-female centric topics represented and edited, the tendency for female users to be more active in the social and community aspects of Misplaced Pages, continued reversions or edits on female-submitted information, or too much controversy. Another potential reason is that public thought forums in general reflect this sort of gender disparity, with a roughly 15% female to 85% male user base.

In July 2014, the National Science Foundation announced that it would spend $200,000 to study systemic gender bias on Misplaced Pages. The study will be led by Julia Adams and Hannah Brueckner.

Reaction

The Wikimedia Foundation has acknowledged since at least 2011, when Gardner was executive director, that gender bias exists in the project. It has made some attempts to address it but Gardner has expressed frustration with the degree of success achieved. She has also noted that "in the very limited leisure time women had, they tended to be more involved in social activities instead of editing Misplaced Pages. 'Women see technology more as a tool they use to accomplish tasks, rather than something fun in itself.'" The Foundation has set a target of having 25 percent of its contributors identifying as female by 2015.

The three domains of countering gender bias

There are three domains of countering gender bias as it affects Misplaced Pages at the level of its readers, its editors, and its administrators. The study of gender bias at both for-profit and non-profit institutions such as Misplaced Pages is part of the fields titled organizational behavior and industrial organization economics. The issue of concern is that patterns of behavior involving gender bias may develop within large institutions, such as Misplaced Pages, which become institutionally maladapted and harmful to the productivity and viability of the larger institutions from which they develop. Gender bias affects Misplaced Pages at three separate levels or domains of interaction both internally at Misplaced Pages and in Misplaced Pages's interaction with its world-wide readers in the outside world. The three domains of interaction influenced by gender bias are (1) possible biases in the readers using Misplaced Pages which in 2011 was relatively equally distributed across gender; (2) currently inflected biases of gender among editors which appear to favor male participation at a ratio of over five to one, and which appear to favor male volunteers among readers becoming editors at a similar ratio; and (3) currently inflected biases in gender representation among administrators at Misplaced Pages which is under the internal control of the appointment of administrators by the general community of editors within Misplaced Pages who support them.

References

1. ^ Statistics based on Wikimedia Foundation Misplaced Pages editor surveys 2011 (Nov. 2010-April 2011) and November 2011 (April - October 2011)
2. Glott, Ruediger; Schmidt, Philipp; Ghosh, Rishab (March 2010). "Misplaced Pages Survey: Overview Results" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 14 April 2010. Retrieved 11 August 2014.
3. Cohen, Noam (30 January 2011). "Define Gender Gap? Look Up Misplaced Pages's Contributor List". New York Times. Retrieved 31 January 2011.
4. "Where Are the Women in Misplaced Pages?". New York Times. 2 February 2011. Retrieved 9 August 2014.
5. Herring, Susan C. (4 February 2011). "Communication Styles Make a Difference". New York Times (opinion). Retrieved 11 August 2014.
6. Reagle, Joseph M. (4 February 2011). "'Open' Doesn't Include Everyone". New York Times (opinion). Retrieved 11 August 2014.
7. Cassell, Justine (4 February 2011). "Editing Wars Behind the Scenes". New York Times (opinion).
8. Reagle, Joseph; Rhue, Lauren (2011). "Gender Bias in Misplaced Pages and Britannica". International Journal of Communication. 5. Joseph Reagle & Lauren Rhue: 1138-1158.
9. "Misplaced Pages Editors Study: Results From The Editor Survey, April 2011" (PDF). Misplaced Pages. April 2011. Retrieved 18 May 2014.
10. ^ Lam, Shyong K.; Uduwage, Anuradha; Dong, Zhenhua; Sen, Shilad; Musicant, David R.; Terveen, Loren; Reidl, John (October 2011). WP:Clubhouse? An Exploration of Misplaced Pages’s Gender Imbalance (PDF). WikiSym'11. ACM.
11. Gardner, Sue (19 February 2011). "Nine Reasons Why Women Don't Edit Misplaced Pages, In Their Own Words". suegardner.org (blog).
12. Yasseri, Taha; Liao, Han-Teng; Konieczny, Piotr; Morgan, Jonathan; Bayer, Tilman (31 July 2013). "Recent research — Napoleon, Michael Jackson and Srebrenica across cultures, 90% of Misplaced Pages better than Britannica, WikiSym preview". The Signpost. Misplaced Pages.
13. Harrington, Elizabeth (30 July 2014). "Government-Funded Study: Why Is Misplaced Pages Sexist?". Washington Free Beacon. Retrieved 31 July 2014.
14. Huang, Keira (11 August 2013). "Misplaced Pages fails to bridge gender gap". South China Morning Post.
15. "Wikistorming". FemTechNet. Fall 2013.
16. Jemielniak, Dariusz (2014). Common Knowledge? An Ethnography of Misplaced Pages. Stanford University. ISBN 9780804791205.

Further reading

• Bort, Julie (15 February 2014). "A Growing Army Of Women Are Taking On Misplaced Pages's Sexism Problem". Business Insider. Retrieved 9 August 2014.
• Filipacchi, Amanda (24 April 2013). "Misplaced Pages's Sexism Toward Women Novelists". New York Times (op-ed).
• Filipacchi, Amanda (30 April 2013). "Sexism on Misplaced Pages Is Not the Work of 'a Single Misguided Editor'". Atlantic. Atlantic Monthly Group. Retrieved 9 August 2014.
• Gleick, James (29 April 2013). "Misplaced Pages's Women Problem". New York Review of Books. NYREV. Retrieved 19 November 2013.
• Glott, Ruediger; Schmidt, Philipp; Ghosh, Rishab (March 2010). "Misplaced Pages Survey: Overview Results" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 14 April 2010. Retrieved 11 August 2014.
• Kloppenburg, Julia; Buchem, Ilona; Ducki, Antje; Khayati, Sarah; Weichert, Nils (2014). Charting Diversity: Working Together Towards Diversity in Misplaced Pages. Berlin: Wikimedia Deutschland. ISBN 978-3-9816799-0-8. Retrieved 9 August 2014.
• Knibbs, Kate (10 February 2014). "Chipping away at Misplaced Pages's gender bias, one article at a time". The Daily Dot. Retrieved 30 April 2014.
• Leonard, Andrew (29 April 2013). "Misplaced Pages's shame: Sexism isn't the problem at the online encyclopedia. The real corruption is the lust for revenge". Salon Media Group. Retrieved 9 August 2014.
• Morris, Kevin (1 May 2013). "Does Misplaced Pages's sexism problem really prove that the system works?". The Daily Dot. Retrieved 19 November 2013.
• Zandt, Deanna (26 April 2013). "Yes, Misplaced Pages is Sexist". Forbes. Retrieved 19 November 2013.
• Zevallos, Zuleyka (8 June 2014). "Sexism on Misplaced Pages: Why the #YesAllWomen Edits Matter". othersociologist.com. Zuleyka Zevallos. Retrieved 9 August 2014.
• "Where Are the Women in Misplaced Pages?". New York Times. 2 February 2011. Retrieved 9 August 2014. - Introduction and links to eight opinions.

External links

• Gender gap Wikimedia Foundation

• Misplaced Pages
• Gender studies
• Sexism