Heather Mac Donald’s 2011 piece on Wikipedia’s gender bias only makes Wikipedia as an afterthought. But it should have been the heart of the article. Highlights:
Most observers blame media gender imbalances on “gatekeeper biases,” but the actual bias goes the other way:
The idea that these gender imbalances represent gatekeeper bias was demonstrably false even before the Wiki reality check. Any female writer or speaker who is not painfully aware of the many instances in which she has been included in a forum because of her sex is self-deluded. Far from being indifferent—much less hostile—to female representation, every remotely mainstream organization today assiduously seeks to include as many females as possible in its ranks.
If gatekeeper bias explains gender imbalances, then getting rid of the gatekeeper should get rid of the bias. In fact, it makes the imbalance bigger:
Famously, Wikipedia has no gatekeepers. Anyone can write or edit an entry, either anonymously or under his or her own name. All that is required is a zeal for knowledge and accuracy. (The desire to share knowledge and the drive to correct errors are the top motivations of contributors, the Wikimedia study found.) Wikipedia provides a naturally occurring control group to test the theory that females’ low participation rate in various public forums is the result of exclusion.
It turns out that without gatekeepers, women’s representation drops—which makes sense, given the constant quota-izing by gatekeepers on women’s behalf. The barely 13-percent-female participation to Wikipedia is less than the 15-percent-female participation in “public thought-leadership forums” which the OpEd Project has calculated (and which the Times cites), let alone the 27-percent-female participation rate VIDA calculated at TheNew Yorker.
More:
Rather than using barrier-free Wikipedia as the benchmark for measuring discrimination in the by-invitation-only world, the Times uses the invitation-only-world as the benchmark for Wikipedia. Since we already know that the low female participation rate in gatekeepered forums is the result of bias, the low female participation rate in Wikipedia must also be the result of bias.
And here’s a succinct statement of what ought to be the default position:
The most straightforward explanation for the differing rates of participation in Wikipedia—and the one that conforms to everyday experience—is that, on average, males and females have different interests and preferred ways of spending their free time. These differences include, on average, the orientation toward highly “fact-based realms” as well as the drive to acquire and expand abstract knowledge… While there are some females who track baseball statistics with as much zeal as males, they are in the minority. Subjects of disproportionately female interest, such as celebrity fashion flubs, have not generated the same bank of shared knowledge as sports records. Wikipedia articles will, of course, reflect this disparity.
An inspiring ending I’ll share with my daughter when she’s older:
Wikipedia’s gender imbalance is a non-problem in search of a misguided solution. It would do a lot less damage to equality to acknowledge that men and women are not identical in their interests than to suggest that “freedom, openness, [and] egalitarian ideas” are inconsistent with female self-realization.
READER COMMENTS
raja_r
Dec 9 2021 at 10:34am
You might be interested in the “gender bias” in contribution to open source software (another domain where there are no gatekeepers):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diversity_in_open-source_software
Daniel Klein
Dec 9 2021 at 11:08am
Nice follow-up, Bryan.
Heather MacDonald is great.
Thomas Lee Hutcheson
Dec 10 2021 at 7:20am
There is a lot of wisdom in this, but If there are factors other than gendered inclination (and the inclinations don’t fall entirely from the DNA sky) than the gender bias IS a problem for Wikipedia and the people who use it. There can be proposed solutions that are WORSE than the problem but that does not mean that no ameliorating measures exist.
I see this tendency to correctly identify faulty proposed solutions to problems but without identifying less faulty solutions is a besetting sin of Libertarian writers.
Mark Z
Dec 10 2021 at 9:19pm
It’s only a ‘sin’ if there’s actually a problem (you yourself acknowledge that’s not necessarily so with the ‘if’ in your first sentence) to be solved, and even then, if the solution is much worse than doing nothing, then pointing out what’s wrong with the proposed solution is the most important work.
Jacob
Dec 10 2021 at 4:14pm
While Wikipedia doesn’t have overt barriers to entry, and much of the platform is ostensiably open to edit, controversial topics have significantly more gatekeeping than you’d expect. There are people on high-profile pages constantly prowling to revert anything that doesn’t fit their narrow worldview, and a lot of confrontation is necessary to change such pages, even if you’ve got a good point.
I.e. nobody cares if you edit “Mandolin”, but try editing even a minor sentance on “The Pope”, “Barrack Obama”, or “Global Warning” and see how it goes for you. Even if you’ve got a good point and evidence to back it up.
While this is not overtly sexist gatekeeping, per se, is does makes it significantly less likely for women, who tend to be more agreeable (in the psychological sense), to make significant changes to controversial topics.
I’ve got a few pages I’d like to edit myself, but I’m not willing to go through the amount of confrontation necessary to make changes to them. And I’m not super agreeable.
Joel Pollen
Dec 11 2021 at 12:31pm
I agree with you, it’s a misrepresentation to say that Wikipedia has no gatekeeping at all. Like you said, there’s quite a lot, particularly on important pages.
I don’t think this entirely invalidates MacDonald’s point, though. It’s really easy to be anonymous on Wikipedia, and so it doesn’t seem plausible that men are specifically discriminating against women in this setting.
You point out that women are kept from contributing because gatekeeping keeps agreeable people out, and I agree. But that isn’t discrimination. It’s another way of saying that men and women have different preferences.
Agreeable people aren’t ever going to engage in disagreement as much as others. The whole point of the concept of agreeableness is that some people avoid disagreement for internal personality reasons, independent of discrimination or anything else.
Infovores
Dec 11 2021 at 11:21am
“The desire to share knowledge and the drive to correct errors are the top motivations of contributors, the Wikimedia study found.”
As Jacob alludes to above, I think that the drive “to correct errors” includes a fair amount of biased crusading on behalf of some narrow cause. America’s greatest journalistic institutions have at times been able to balance out this tendency by requiring an editing process and bringing on writers with more moderate viewpoints to act as a counterbalance. In short, they provided thoughtful gatekeeping.
While it is true that the gender imbalance on Wikipedia arises naturally from obsessive information sharers and disagreeable personalities being more drawn to the medium, there is a reasonable case to be made that this natural development is not exactly good. Having more women contribute to these spaces on the margin probably would improve them somewhat. I for one am grateful for the female commenters I have seen on this site*.
To conclude, I believe that Wikipedia’s decentralized form of voluntary gatekeeping is much better than the typical gatekeeping we see from mainstream media institutions. But it is important to recognize the positive role that formal gatekeeping can sometimes play and keep in mind that Wikipedia has its own asymmetries in producing content that can lead to some well-reasoned and footnoted views being dominated by louder voices.
*HT to Lillian H. for teaching me about the fascinating history of imperial harems on Bryan’s Goalposts of consent article!
Tom West
Dec 12 2021 at 11:12am
I don’t know about Wikipedia, but my observation of the world is that where humans are concerned, if a “natural rate of participation” is below about 30-40%, society starts working hard to reduce it to 0%. (At its modern worst, typically by labeling minority participation as “unnatural” or “weird”, challenging the existence of such minorities, etc. More commonly its peers subjecting minority participants to greater scrutiny or harboring discomfort about their participation.)
I consider this an artifact of the human brain (we tend to “cast to boolean”) so I don’t consider any evil intent necessary for such conditions to evolve, but it doesn’t make the harm caused by this any less.
As such, I don’t have a problem with policies meant to increase minority participation, even if motivated with a possibly incorrect assumption of absolute equality. I figure that most who are ‘lured’ into minority participation by such policies were those who were discouraged by general societal constraints that face any minority.
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