Why don’t women edit Wikipedia articles? An experimental study

Presenter

Linfeng Li

PhD candidate

University of Michigan’s School of Information

Time and location

North Quad 4330, Wednesday (1:00-2:00) pm

Abstract

There is a sizable and persistent participatory gender gap on Wikipedia. Since the first report from 2010, it has been repeatedly reported that less than 25% of the Wikipedia editors are women. This participatory gender gap shall lead to all sorts of bias both in content creation and in the dynamics of community interaction. In our experiment, we test the hypothesis that women are less likely to contribute their ideas in gender-incongruent areas (Coffman 2014). In particular, we examine the very last step of the “Wikipedia editing pipeline” by randomly assigning Wikipedia articles from two groups — “Economist’s Bio” and “Econ Concept” — to the subjects. We find that women are significantly less likely to edit an “Econ Concept” article (41.97%) than an “Economist’s Bio” article (64.28%). And, when assigned to edit the “Economist’s Bio” articles, men and women are equally likely to perform an edit.