

Why are women unwilling to contribute to wikipedia? - yummyfajitas
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/02/02/where-are-the-women-in-wikipedia/the-antisocial-factor

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tiffani
I think that article is wayy off and the title of this thread is teetering in
the same direction. Nothing about that article explicitly says anything about
women being "unwilling" to contribute to Wikipedia.

I used to spend a lot of time editing and contributing to certain articles,
but notice what I said, "spend a lot of time." Sure, you can quickly fix
spelling and grammatical errors, but to really do anything useful on the site
takes more time. I'd easily spend a few hours a week (depending on what else I
had to do) during college editing articles.

But, for every woman that has time to do that, there are plenty that don't
(think of women who still operate according to traditional gender expectations
--taking care of family, etc.). This is not to say that men don't have other
demands on their time, however. The author misses the mark entirely when it
comes to that aspect, though. You'd only know that if at some point you've
spent any time contributing at all. I'd have to wonder if the author ever
has...

Plus, I don't think we should be so quick to throw gender on top of everything
as a reason why something has or hasn't happened. I could be wrong, but I
really don't believe that the average Wikipedia visitor even really pays
attention to who wrote any given article, much less going so far as to find
out whether they were a male, female, or any variant.

~~~
yummyfajitas
_Nothing about that article explicitly says anything about women being
"unwilling" to contribute to Wikipedia._

The authors all implicitly agree that unwillingness is the reason. Logically,
there are only two reasons women would not contribute - inability and
unwillingness.

They speculate various reasons why women are unwilling - women
disproportionately dislike the neutral point of view, they prefer a walled
garden, they dislike edit wars or hacker elitism, or they dislike "anti-
social" behavior such as sitting at home writing a wikipedia article.

They never once suggest inability as the reason women don't contribute.

------
farlington
I've heard it stated (and I can't remember where) that the major difference
between the social behavior of women and men online is that women tend to use
social networks to extend existing real world relationships, and men tend to
use social networks to replace or substitute for real world relationships.

Like any generalization, I can think of plenty of counterexamples and
exceptions, but as a general statement it kind of rings true for me.

