Wikipedia:WikiProject Countering systemic bias/Gender gap task force/research

Below is a list of research studies about the gender gap and Wikimedia projects.

Also see:


 * Media articles, some studies on Wikipedia's gender gap
 * Research studies on online gender gap, related resources
 * Gender-gap projects, Wikimedia and Wikipedia

Wikimedia Foundation-sponsored studies
Foundation editor survey 2009
 * Wikimedia press release about first, November 2008 survey by Wikimedia Foundation and the United Nations University’s tech-research program MERIT).
 * 2009 Wikimania slideshow about the survey.

Foundation editor survey 2010
 * Ruediger Glott, Philipp Schmidt, Rishab Ghosh, Wikipedia survey overview, UNU-MERIT (with Wikimedia Foundation), Maastricht, Netherlands, March 2010. Over 58,000 self-selected Wikipedians from 22 language editions in 231 countries responded; contributors reported as about 87% men and 13% women); (Archived original), accessed August 14, 2014.
 * Per above Wall Street Journal blog entry on this

Foundation editor survey 2011-#1
 * Research:Wikipedia Editors Survey 2011 (Nov. 2010-April 2011) Survey report
 * Wikimedia blog entry overview of early 2011 Editor Survey (Search for other blog entries on editor surveys)
 * Research proves gender imbalance on Wikipedia, University of Minnesota, on YouTube, August 2011

Foundation editor survey 2011-#2
 * Research:Wikipedia Editors Survey November 2011 (April - October 2011) Survey report
 * Women Editors Survey overview
 * Graphics from above study: Editors reporting harassment outside Wikipedia; Gender balance bar chart (using differing registered vs. editor statistics); Predominantly male pie chart (using 9% female editors statistic)

Foundation editor survey 2012
 * Research:Wikipedia Editor Survey 2012 (July-November 2012) (Final report in progress, with discussion of updates on talk page.)


 * Other Wikimedia studies
 * Research:Gender micro-survey of impact VisualEditor might have on gender diversity (in progress)
 * Gender Inequality Index studying biographies of men and female by year by ethnicity/nationality (in progress)
 * Amanda Menking, Women and Wikipedia assessing existing efforts to address the gender gap (in progress)
 * Charting Diversity:Working together towards diversity in Wikipedia, Report produced by Beuth University (Berlin) and Wikimedia Deutschland, 2014
 * See also Wikipedians/Demographics

About Wikimedia Foundation funding of Gender Gap research

 * Nontechnical Movement Support: Grants, Evaluation, Legal Support and Communications, "Overall Grantmaking Targets (by the end of June 2015)" section reads in part: "Increase support to challenging the gender gap to at least 1.5 percent of total grants spending, and host at least two diversity events in order to build out an executable gender gap strategy (baseline: 2013-14 YTD grants to gender gap issues ~1 percent; current year’s target: 1 percent)..." accessed August 12, 2014
 * WMF Metrics and activities meetings/Quarterly reviews/Grantmaking/September 2014 includes a graphic showing little progress in retaining women editors or increasing content about notable women.

Outside studies

 * Tanja Carstensen, Gender Trouble in Web 2.0: Gender Relations in Social Network Sites, Wikis and Weblogs, International Journal of Gender, Science and Technology, 2009, Vol. 1, No.1
 * Laura Hale, Writing styles of women, on Wikimedia, 2011
 * See also Joseph Reagle's later comments, The Nuance of the Gendergap Statistics, personal web site, January 30, 2013
 * See also Joseph Reagle's later comments, The Nuance of the Gendergap Statistics, personal web site, January 30, 2013


 * Judd Antin, Raymond Yee, Coye Cheshire, Oded Nov, "Gender Differences in Wikipedia Editing", WikiSym’11, October 3-5, 2011, study funded by Research Fund at UC Berkeley. Perhaps the most significant finding is that male editors tend to make an edit followed by revisions to that edit, whereas women tend to make single, larger edits and less revisions.
 * See also overview What the most active female editors contribute, Research:Wikimedia newsletter


 * H. T. Welser, D. Cosley, G. Kossinets, A. Lin, F. Dokshin, G. Gay, and M. Smith, Finding social roles in Wikipedia,  Proceedings of the 2011 iConference, page 122-129, 2011. (Provides interesting context.)
 * (Notes that contributions of users who identified as women are significantly more likely to be challenged or undone by fellow editors, according to a 2011 report by the University of Minnesota.)
 * See also overview University of Minnesota researchers reveal Wikipedia gender biases; Gender gap shows no sign of closing over the past five years, University of Minnesota "Discover", August 11, 2011


 * Collier, B., & Bear, J. (2012). “Conflict, criticism, or confidence”. In Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work- CSCW ’12 (p. 383). New York, New York, USA: ACM Press. DOI
 * See also overview "Gender gap connected to conflict aversion and lower confidence among women", Sign Post, February 27, 2012


 * Steiner, Linda; Eckert, Stine, Wikipedia's Gender Gap, International Communication Association conference paper, 2012.
 * Pablo Aragón, Andreas Kaltenbrunner, David Laniado, Yana Volkovich (Barcelona Media Foundation), Biographical Social Networks on Wikipedia - A cross-cultural study of links that made history V2, last revised July 4, 2012,, Proceedings of WikiSym, 2012.
 * See over view at: The Worrying Consequences of the Wikipedia Gender Gap, Technology review, April 19, 2012


 * DOI
 * Damon Poeter, Infographic: Wikipedia's Gender Gap Exposed, PC magazine, August 8, 2012. Report on tech marketing agency KnockTwice research. Includes interesting assertion: "female editors are more likely to get blocked indefinitely on Wikipedia" whose actual source needs researching.


 * Collier, B., & Bear, J. (2012). Conflict, criticism, or confidence. Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work - CSCW ’12 (p. 383). New York, New York, USA: ACM Press. PDF • DOI
 * Joseph Reagle, “Free as in sexist?” Free culture and the gender gap, First Monday, Volume 18, Number 1, January 2013
 * See also Jared Spurbeck, Study Shows Gender Bias in Wikipedia, Linux, originally at Yahoo! News, January 2013
 * See also Jared Spurbeck, Study Shows Gender Bias in Wikipedia, Linux, originally at Yahoo! News, January 2013


 * Benjamin Mako Hill, Aaron Shaw, The Wikipedia Gender Gap Revisited: Characterizing Survey Response Bias with Propensity Score Estimation, June 26, 2013, PLOS ONE, DOI
 * Recent research: Survey participation bias analysis: More Wikipedia editors are female, married or parents than previously assumed, July 31, 2013
 * Recent research: Survey participation bias analysis: More Wikipedia editors are female, married or parents than previously assumed, July 31, 2013


 * “(Re)triggering Backlash: Responses to News About Wikipedia’s Gender Gap". Journal of Communication Inquiry, October 2013, 37 (4): 284. DOI
 * "Gender gap coverage in media and blogs" section of a December 5, 2013 Wikimedia blog entry summarizes article. In short: based on a qualitative analysis of 42 articles from US news media and blogs, and 1,336 comments from online readers authors see a “broader backlash against women, and particularly feminism” in the U.S. news media and blogs. They question whether the Wikimedia Foundation is properly addressing the issue.


 * Jonathan T. Morgan, Siko Bouterse, Heather Walls, Sarah Stierch, (2013) "Tea and sympathy: crafting positive new user experiences on wikipedia", In: Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Computer supported cooperative work. New York, NY, USA: ACM, CSCW '13, p. 839–848. DOI
 * Eszter Hargittai and Aaron Shaw on Internet Skills and Wikipedia's Gender Inequality, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, January 21, 2014
 * Laura Hale, The role of English Wikipedia’s top content creators in perpetuating gender bias, WikiNewsReporter, February 20, 2014
 * Maximilian Klein, Sex Ratios in Wikidata, Wikipedias, and VIAF I & http://hangingtogether.org/?p=2986 Sex Ratios in Wikidata, Wikipedias, and VIAF I] - March 2013; Sex Ratios in Wikidata Part III, May 21, 2014
 * Young-Ho Eom, Pablo Aragón, David Laniado, Andreas Kaltenbrunner, Sebastiano Vigna, Dima L. Shepelyansky, Interactions of cultures and top people of Wikipedia from ranking of 24 language editions, submitted on 28 May 2014 to Computer Science/Social and Information Networks, Cornell University
 * Daniela Iosub, et al, "Emotions under Discussion: Gender, Status and Communication in Online Collaboration", PLOS ONE, 20 August 2014 Quote: "A persistent gender difference is that female contributors communicate in a manner that promotes social affiliation and emotional connection more than male editors, irrespective of their status in the community. Female regular editors are the most relationship-oriented, whereas male administrators are the least relationship-focused. Finally, emotional and linguistic homophily is prevalent: editors tend to interact with other editors having similar emotional styles."

In progress
 * Julia Adams, Hannah Brueckner, “Wikipedia and the Democratization of Academic Knowledge”, a two-year National Science Foundation grant for exploring gender-specific patterns of representation of scholars and scholarship. One of the project’s goals is to contribute to improving quality and reducing bias on academic – and more general – Wikipedia."