Women constitute only 13% of Wikipedia’s contributors
Mike Dover links to a study that says only 13% of Wikipedia’s contributors are female. Dover then quotes Phillip Greenspun offering a theory about why:
“A lot more men than women choose to do seemingly irrational things such as become petty criminals, fly homebuilt helicopters, play video games, and keep tropical fish as pets (98 percent of the attendees at the American Child Association convention that I last attended were male). Should we be surprised that it is mostly men who spend 10 years banging their heads against an equation-filled blackboard in hopes of landing a $35,000/year post-doc job? …Young men strive to achieve high status among their peer group. [Yet] men tend to lack perspective and are unable to step back and ask the question “is this peer group worth impressing?”…
So it is with Wikipedia. Why invest your free time wrangling with a politicized Wikipedia bureaucracy of infighting editors and bitter story subjects, all for the honor of creating a free resource for other people and paying out of your own pocket to go to high-level meetings for the Wikimedia elite? If you’re a man, for the honor of being near the “top” of something, no matter how fruitless.
Greenspun is always a mix of insight and blind spots.
There is something appealing about such a pleasant story. In this version of the world, women do not face discrimination, instead, they avoid certain professions because they are wiser than men. That is a clever argument, though probably too clever. There is a whiff of a fairy tale hidden in that happy ending – women are wiser than men and no doubt end up happier than men because they avoid all that bothersome competition over nothing.
However, the premise is suspect. Are men stupid because they engage in petty crime? Does petty crime ever pay? If, for instance, you can make good money selling drugs, then crime might be a rational decision. Flying a home made helicopter may not be wise, unless is brings you publicity you can use. Then it becomes a rational decision.
I’ve read that young men tend to take more physical risks than women. That might be stupid. Or that might be rational. Some risks have high pay-offs. In a larger context, and in the context of career, the more you encourage someone to avoid big risks, the more you may also be encouraging them to avoid big pay offs. Whether or not that is rational depends on a hundred variables – it is never a simple judgement to make.
Despite my reservations, I can imagine some grain of truth in what Greenspun says. In her book You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation Deborah Tannen says that men view themselves as belonging to a hierarchy whereas women view themselves as being embedded in a network. I’ve never been comfortable with that generalization, as it seems to imply that women are innocent regarding social rank. I can not imagine a human being who doesn’t understand social rank. I would be interested, though, if men and women tend measure themselves against hierarchies of different scales. Greenspun’s comment could be read as mocking men who compete for status in hierarchies of very small scales. Certainly I can recall instances where a man is excitedly, urgently explaining to a woman why some small success in some small sub-culture is actually of great importance, and the woman sitting there somewhat bemused, trying to understand why the man sees such importance in so small a triumph.
But this is something that women never do? If we are going to deal in anecdotes, it seems easy enough to find countervailing examples. For every man over-thrilled at his advance to a new rank in a chess tournament, there is a woman over-thrilled at the new pattern her knitting group has decided to work on.
The strategy of Greenspun’s comment is an ancient one. The overall gist is “Men are oppressed by strife and worry, competition and war; women are wiser than all that and remain blissfully happy by focusing on things that have real lasting value.” You can find variation of Greenspun’s comment in every country, in every century. Depending on the century, and the country, things that “have real lasting value” can be defined differently: children, god, honoring one’s ancestors, etc. But the end result of this reasoning, even when it is well-intentioned, is to provide justification for keeping women out of those professions that they might otherwise choose to pursue.
The tech industry has a problem. It is moving against the modern current. Almost all other major professions have opened their doors to women. Women now make up nearly 50% of all new doctors, and almost 40% of all new lawyers. Yet the number of women who receive advanced degrees in computer science peaked in 1989 and has since declined. Disparities of men versus women in any particular online pursuit needs to be closely examined, not cleverly made to seem unimportant.