Wikipedia:WikiProject Countering systemic bias/Gender gap task force

Gender gap
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Welcome to the gender gap task force (GGTF), one of the task forces of WikiProject Countering systemic bias. The GGTF was started in 2013 to address some of the problems women face on Wikipedia, whether as editors or article subjects. If you'd like to help, please add your name to the list of participants.

According to New York Magazine in 2014, "Wikipedia famously bears one of the starkest gender gaps in contemporary culture."^[1] Wikipedia "shares many characteristics with the hard-driving hacker crowd", according to Joseph Reagle of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and is "open to very difficult, high-conflict people, even misogynists".^[2] Estimates of Wikipedians who are female have ranged from 8.5 in 2011 to 16.1 percent in 2013.^[3]^[4]

Issues that discourage women from editing include a perception of Wikipedia as sexist; a lack of confidence and spare time; problems with the editing interface; the belief that editing is tedious; unease because of the inclusion of pornography; and fewer opportunities to develop social relationships than on other websites.^[1]^[5]^[6] Despite significant evidence to the contrary, certain commentators have denied that the gender gap is a problem, citing efforts to highlight it as "feminist ideology."^[7]

^ ^a ^b Stoeffel, Kat (11 February 2014). "Closing Wikipedia's Gender Gap — Reluctantly". New York Magazine.
^ Cohen, Noam (31 January 2011). "Define gender gap? Look up Wikipedia's contributor list". The New York Times.
^ Wikimedia Foundation (April 2011). Wikipedia Editors' Survey (pdf). Wikimedia Foundation.
^ Hill, Benjamin Mako; Shaw, Aaron (June 2013). "The Wikipedia gender gap revisited: characterizing survey response bias with propensity score estimation". PLOS ONE. 8 (6): e65782. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0065782.
^ Gardner, Sue (19 February 2011). "Nine reasons women don't edit Wikipedia (in their own words)". suegardner.org.
^ Staff writer (8 August 2014). "Wikipedia 'completely failed' to fix gender imbalance". BBC News. BBC.
^ Eckert, Stine; Steiner, Linda (October 2013). "(Re)triggering backlash: responses to news about Wikipedia's gender gap". Journal of Communication Inquiry. 37 (4): 284–303. doi:10.1177/0196859913505618.