According to an article in the New York Times today, the Wikipedia Foundation, the organization that runs Wikipedia, has its knickers in a twist over the discovery that “barely 13 percent” of its more than 3.5 million articles were written by women. Naturally the foundation found this female underrepresentation unacceptable and “has set a goal to raise the share of female contributors to 25 percent by 2015.”
This may sound like naked gender balancing, but Sue Gardner, executive director of the Wikipedia Foundation, assures us “[h]er effort is not diversity for diversity’s sake.” For whose sake, then, is it? “This,” Gardner says, “is about wanting to ensure that the encyclopedia is as good as it could be….”
“Everyone brings their crumb of information to the table,” she said. “If they are not at the table, we don’t benefit from their crumb.” [Emphasis added. If you rely on Wikipedia, you risk relying on self-nominated experts who do not cringe, as grammatical purists do, upon confronting plural pronouns referring back to singular nouns. Despite its popularity, however, everyone are not happy about this usage.]
This is a crumby argument if ever I heard one (is it a given that female crumbs are different from male crumbs on every subject?), but Wikipedia does present a difficult problem for race and gender balancers, who generally assume that “underrepresentation” is the visible evidence of often invisible discrimination. So, who’s discriminating here? Are women discriminating against themselves by not volunteering to write for Wikipedia?
Jane Margolis, co-author of a book on sexism in computer science, “Unlocking the Clubhouse,” argues that Wikipedia is experiencing the same problems of the offline world, where women are less willing to assert their opinions in public. “In almost every space, who are the authorities, the politicians, writers for op-ed pages?” said Ms. Margolis, a senior researcher at the Institute for Democracy, Education and Access at the University of California, Los Angeles.
According to the OpEd Project, an organization based in New York that monitors the gender breakdown of contributors to “public thought-leadership forums,” a participation rate of roughly 85-to-15 percent, men to women, is common — whether members of Congress, or writers on The New York Times and Washington Post Op-Ed pages.
It would seem to be an irony that Wikipedia, where the amateur contributor is celebrated, is experiencing the same problem as forums that require expertise….
Joseph Reagle, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, also sees an irony here. Wikipedia, he says, “shares many characteristics with the hard-driving hacker crowd,” including
an ideology that resists any efforts to impose rules or even goals like diversity, as well as a culture that may discourage women.
“It is ironic,” he said, “because I like these things — freedom, openness, egalitarian ideas — but I think to some extent they are compounding and hiding problems you might find in the real world.”
But it is only an “irony” that “freedom, openness, egalitarian ideas” don’t lead to perfect gender (and presumably racial) balance if you assume, as most with it hip people do, that “underrepresentation” is always the smoke that always points to a discriminatory fire. If there is an irony here, it is not the one perceived by Noam Cohen, the Times reporter, or the Wikipedians he quotes.
“The notion that a collaborative, written project open to all is so skewed to men may be surprising,” Cohen writes. “After all, there is no male-dominated executive team favoring men over women, as there can be in the corporate world….” It never seems to have occurred to him, or those he quotes, that the fact that the proportion of women Wikipedia authors is similar to the proportion of women working on “male-dominated executive team[s]” may suggest there is less sex discrimination in the “offline world” than they assume.
ADDENDUM
For a discussion of this point in greater depth — or at least at greater length — see my discussion of EEOC v. Sears, Roebuck and Co. in the last two-thirds or so of this post, in which I noted that
the “underrepresentation” (compared to what?) of women in such jobs as installing home heating systems was not necessarily the result of discrimination by Sears….
The percentage of women in various positions at Sears (selling hardware, clothes, appliances, air conditioners, etc.) closely tracked the percentage of women among sole proprietorships in those areas. Did women discriminate against themselves in choosing what businesses to run?
