Surveys suggest that less than 15 percent of the online encyclopedia’s hundreds of thousands of contributors are female. […]
Sue Gardner, the executive director of the foundation, has set a goal to raise the share of female contributors to 25 percent by 2015, but she is running up against the traditions of the computer world and an obsessive fact-loving realm that is dominated by men and, some say, uncomfortable for women.
Her effort is not diversity for diversity’s sake, she says. “This is about wanting to ensure that the encyclopedia is as good as it could be,”
Is Wikipedia creating a glass ceiling, actively blocking women from participating? Well, or maybe women are different. Or maybe men really are the gender that creates knowledge, wealth, public services, etc?
I would imagine that if less than 15% of the contributors are women, then much less than 15% of the work is done by women.
Considering that almost nobody gets paid for Wikipedia, the most obvious thing that can be said about its existence from a gender point of view is that the human race owes a debt of gratitude to the male sex.
[… men see the point] n working for free to expand access to information for people they don’t know. But blaming any problem, even one as exiguous as women not contributing much unpaid labor to Wikipedia, on women is a no-no, so the fault must lie with “misogynists.”
Guys Create Wikipedia For Free: That’s A Problem
