Is Wikipedia Male Biased?
There was an interesting post in Andrew Sullivan's Blog, The Daily Dish, about women writing for Wikipedia. The author of the quoted letter purports to be a female editor for Wikipedia. The article in question discusses why the lack of more female editors and participation in Wiki by females is a bad thing.
She starts of by saying that the number and length of articles referencing items of interest to men and women are quite different. For men, "trivial entries" like " Dale Earnhardt, Jr., homebrewing, Xbox 360" all have long articles, while articles that might interest women such as "blush... moisturizer, lip liner, threading" are all basically stubs, have wrong information, or wrong pictures. She points out that the photograph used for the entry on blush is actually a case of lip gloss, and from what I see she's right.
At first I was reading this and nodding my head, but then it really came to me that the articles she's talking about are stereotypical, female thing about appearance. Hair dye seems to have a long article, waxing seems to be more than a stub...and look! The article on pumps is just fantastically long! The article on manicures seems to need some lengthening though *sob*.
I think that suggesting that Wiki has some intrinsic male bias because the articles on makeup and such aren't quite so long is a really silly way to make such a statement. I would suggest it is more a reflection of the readership than the system itself being biased. Women tend to be less interested (and I'm speaking in general here) in writing articles, and more interested in using the online world as a means of social connection. A Pew Poll taken in 2005 pointed out:
More than men, women are enthusiastic online communicators and they use email in a more robust way. Women send and receive email more than men. Some 94% of online women and 88% of online men use email. Women do more in personal emails with friends and family. More women than men write emails about news, worries, advice and planning.
Women get online, use the Net as a means to conduct business, and play games at about equal rates to men. But women, more than men, see the Net as a means to connect to each other. An interesting article in Business Week from 2008 said:
[M]en above 30-especially married men-aren't even joining social networks. With the notable exceptions of LinkedIn users and venture capitalists in the Bay Area "friending" everyone on Facebook, married men are not hanging out on social networks. Married women, however, are joining social networks in droves. In fact, women between ages 35 and 50 are the fastest-growing segment, especially on MySpace.
The reason the author gives for this disparity is that young men join social networks to find women for potential sex connections (say it isn't so!) whereas women join to actually be connected to people. Once the men get married, and extra-marital sex is hopefully off limits, their interest in such declines.
Now here is the important part, and the crux of my argument, from the Business Week article:
We expect men to keep gravitating to transactional sites, such as those that make gaining access to news, sports, and financial information easier. Women's behavior online, on the other hand, is less transactional and more relationship-driven. They spend more time on social networks building relationships, communicating with friends, and making new friends. Married women use social networks to share pictures and treat their network profiles as family home pages to share with friends and relatives.
Simply put, men spend more time on sites that are information driven -- news, sports, financial information, and yes, Wikipedia. Women are more interested than men in social networking and maintaining connection to others. So it's hardly surprising that Wiki would be more dominated by male articles than females, since men are more likely to read Wiki in the first place on a casual basis, take time to create and edit articles, and debate endlessly about exactly what factoids should or should not be in any given article. As this New York Times article from January 30, 2011 points out:
About a year ago, the Wikimedia Foundation, the organization that runs Wikipedia, collaborated on a study of Wikipedia’s contributor base and discovered that it was barely 13 percent women; the average age of a contributor was in the mid-20s, according to the study by a joint center of the United Nations University and Maastricht University.
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.
What this all comes down to is gender roles: men are socialized (and perhaps biologically driven) toward facts and figures, whereas women are more socialized toward connections. How often do you hear women argue about who won which Super Bowl or what the Dow Jones average was on any given day? Not too often. Since men are more likely to gravitate toward facts, it's not surprising they would write more articles for Wiki.
This doesn't mean that women are doomed to be ghettoized to the world of MySpace, Facebook and makeup. Take for example the huge gains that women have made in the social sciences. According to this 2006 research article by Donna Kinther and Shulamit Khan:
[I]n the 1970s just over 20 percent of doctorates in social sciences were awarded to women. During the past decade, over half of all social science doctorates have been awarded to women. When researchers have studied social sciences, they have often included them with science disciplines. Long et.al. (2001) studies the careers of women in science and social science from 1973-1995 and conclude that women have been successful in moving “from scarcity to visibility.”
The authors point out later in the article that women are still lagging in representation in the hard sciences, but in the "soft" sciences, like sociology and psychology, they are equal to if not leading men in earned higher education degrees. This is hardly surprising, as the "soft" sciences study people and connections, whereas the "hard' sciences are more attuned toward enduring facts and the world-as-it-is.
The author of the entry is Andrew Sullivan's blog points out also:
To suggest that women aren't wimps and don't just edit "women's interest" articles - which many male Wikipedia editors do in discussions on this topic - is another form of sexism. It evaluates women's contributions by whether they measure up to male expectations and interests. (Masculinity is cool, so it's great if everyone wants to participate. Femininity on the other hand.... Well, that's just unserious.) Certainly, many of the women editing Wikipedia don't precisely conform to gender stereotypes, but it is naive to think that men and women have entirely the same areas of interest.
Exactly, we don't all have the same areas of interest. Now, she may certainly see bias on talk pages, "behind the scenes" as it were, from the male editors. But I also seriously doubt that the male editors go around attacking any article on issues of interest to women as "unserious." More likely, they simply wouldn't write, edit, or read them.
I feel that Wiki is a barometer of gender role and interests between men and women. It may very well be possible that in the future we will see changes in editorship, meaning that women are taking greater interest in the fact-driven world that men are more likely to inhabit. Or, women may stay where they are on Facebook and on sites like Christian Dior, looking for that fab shape of lippie to go with their new dress.
-V, noting the Wiki article on lipstick is fairly long.....just saying....
She starts of by saying that the number and length of articles referencing items of interest to men and women are quite different. For men, "trivial entries" like " Dale Earnhardt, Jr., homebrewing, Xbox 360" all have long articles, while articles that might interest women such as "blush... moisturizer, lip liner, threading" are all basically stubs, have wrong information, or wrong pictures. She points out that the photograph used for the entry on blush is actually a case of lip gloss, and from what I see she's right.
At first I was reading this and nodding my head, but then it really came to me that the articles she's talking about are stereotypical, female thing about appearance. Hair dye seems to have a long article, waxing seems to be more than a stub...and look! The article on pumps is just fantastically long! The article on manicures seems to need some lengthening though *sob*.
I think that suggesting that Wiki has some intrinsic male bias because the articles on makeup and such aren't quite so long is a really silly way to make such a statement. I would suggest it is more a reflection of the readership than the system itself being biased. Women tend to be less interested (and I'm speaking in general here) in writing articles, and more interested in using the online world as a means of social connection. A Pew Poll taken in 2005 pointed out:
More than men, women are enthusiastic online communicators and they use email in a more robust way. Women send and receive email more than men. Some 94% of online women and 88% of online men use email. Women do more in personal emails with friends and family. More women than men write emails about news, worries, advice and planning.
Women get online, use the Net as a means to conduct business, and play games at about equal rates to men. But women, more than men, see the Net as a means to connect to each other. An interesting article in Business Week from 2008 said:
[M]en above 30-especially married men-aren't even joining social networks. With the notable exceptions of LinkedIn users and venture capitalists in the Bay Area "friending" everyone on Facebook, married men are not hanging out on social networks. Married women, however, are joining social networks in droves. In fact, women between ages 35 and 50 are the fastest-growing segment, especially on MySpace.
The reason the author gives for this disparity is that young men join social networks to find women for potential sex connections (say it isn't so!) whereas women join to actually be connected to people. Once the men get married, and extra-marital sex is hopefully off limits, their interest in such declines.
Now here is the important part, and the crux of my argument, from the Business Week article:
We expect men to keep gravitating to transactional sites, such as those that make gaining access to news, sports, and financial information easier. Women's behavior online, on the other hand, is less transactional and more relationship-driven. They spend more time on social networks building relationships, communicating with friends, and making new friends. Married women use social networks to share pictures and treat their network profiles as family home pages to share with friends and relatives.
Simply put, men spend more time on sites that are information driven -- news, sports, financial information, and yes, Wikipedia. Women are more interested than men in social networking and maintaining connection to others. So it's hardly surprising that Wiki would be more dominated by male articles than females, since men are more likely to read Wiki in the first place on a casual basis, take time to create and edit articles, and debate endlessly about exactly what factoids should or should not be in any given article. As this New York Times article from January 30, 2011 points out:
About a year ago, the Wikimedia Foundation, the organization that runs Wikipedia, collaborated on a study of Wikipedia’s contributor base and discovered that it was barely 13 percent women; the average age of a contributor was in the mid-20s, according to the study by a joint center of the United Nations University and Maastricht University.
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.
What this all comes down to is gender roles: men are socialized (and perhaps biologically driven) toward facts and figures, whereas women are more socialized toward connections. How often do you hear women argue about who won which Super Bowl or what the Dow Jones average was on any given day? Not too often. Since men are more likely to gravitate toward facts, it's not surprising they would write more articles for Wiki.
This doesn't mean that women are doomed to be ghettoized to the world of MySpace, Facebook and makeup. Take for example the huge gains that women have made in the social sciences. According to this 2006 research article by Donna Kinther and Shulamit Khan:
[I]n the 1970s just over 20 percent of doctorates in social sciences were awarded to women. During the past decade, over half of all social science doctorates have been awarded to women. When researchers have studied social sciences, they have often included them with science disciplines. Long et.al. (2001) studies the careers of women in science and social science from 1973-1995 and conclude that women have been successful in moving “from scarcity to visibility.”
The authors point out later in the article that women are still lagging in representation in the hard sciences, but in the "soft" sciences, like sociology and psychology, they are equal to if not leading men in earned higher education degrees. This is hardly surprising, as the "soft" sciences study people and connections, whereas the "hard' sciences are more attuned toward enduring facts and the world-as-it-is.
The author of the entry is Andrew Sullivan's blog points out also:
To suggest that women aren't wimps and don't just edit "women's interest" articles - which many male Wikipedia editors do in discussions on this topic - is another form of sexism. It evaluates women's contributions by whether they measure up to male expectations and interests. (Masculinity is cool, so it's great if everyone wants to participate. Femininity on the other hand.... Well, that's just unserious.) Certainly, many of the women editing Wikipedia don't precisely conform to gender stereotypes, but it is naive to think that men and women have entirely the same areas of interest.
Exactly, we don't all have the same areas of interest. Now, she may certainly see bias on talk pages, "behind the scenes" as it were, from the male editors. But I also seriously doubt that the male editors go around attacking any article on issues of interest to women as "unserious." More likely, they simply wouldn't write, edit, or read them.
I feel that Wiki is a barometer of gender role and interests between men and women. It may very well be possible that in the future we will see changes in editorship, meaning that women are taking greater interest in the fact-driven world that men are more likely to inhabit. Or, women may stay where they are on Facebook and on sites like Christian Dior, looking for that fab shape of lippie to go with their new dress.
-V, noting the Wiki article on lipstick is fairly long.....just saying....