What sort of free work are women willing to do online?

(written by Lawrence Krubner, however indented passages are often quotes)

Sue Gardner goes looking for quotes from women about why they don’t contribute to wikis, and the main reason seems to be aggression from others:

From a commenter on Feministing: “I agree that Wikipedia can seem hostile and cliquish. Quite simply, I am sensitive and the internet is not generally kind to sensitive people. I am not thick-skinned enough for Wikipedia.”

…“From the inside,” writes Justine Cassell, professor and director of the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, “Wikipedia may feel like a fight to get one’s voice heard. One gets a sense of this insider view from looking at the “talk page” of many articles, which rather than seeming like collaborations around the construction of knowledge, are full of descriptions of “edit-warring” — where successive editors try to cancel each others’ contributions out — and bitter, contentious arguments about the accuracy of conflicting points of view. Flickr users don’t remove each others’ photos. Youtube videos inspire passionate debate, but one’s contributions are not erased. Despite Wikipedia’s stated principle of the need to maintain a neutral point of view, the reality is that it is not enough to “know something” about friendship bracelets or “Sex and the City.” To have one’s words listened to on Wikipedia, often one must have to debate, defend, and insist that one’s point of view is the only valid one.”

“I think [the gender gap] has to do with many Wikipedia editors being bullies. Women tend to take their marbles and go home instead of putting a lot of effort into something where they get slapped around. I work on biographies of obscure women writers, rather under the radar stuff… contribute to more prominent articles makes one paranoid, anyone can come along and undo your work and leave nasty messages and you get very little oversight.”

But then, Lola PR says 94% of the contributors to their fashion wiki are female:

Men and women find different aspects of sites, cars, clothing or food appealing for whatever reason. For a lot of women something that looks down right gorgeous is more appealing and they may be more likely to form an attachment to and want to use. I’m not at all a techie, nor am I an expert in design (I’m a trained econometrician). But I am a founder and dedicated user of a wiki that has a contributor base of 94% women-in fact many are fashion bloggers who are not usually described as geeks.

This statistic is not something that I set out to achieve, quite the contrary, I wanted to make sure that just as many men as women used my wiki. But this just hasn’t happened. If you take the time to look at my wiki you might see why. It’s more than a little pretty, but don’t just take my word for it- quora agrees with me. When I say pretty, I mean aesthetically but also it’s user friendly. It’s less cluttered and a little less overwhelming than traditional wikis have been- très girl friendly.

Another argument as to why it has such a high female contributor rate is the content-fashion. Many might argue that this topic is not something that appeals to many men and they may very well be correct. But a key thread that appeared throughout many of the articles I’ve read on this topic is that women are disinterested in technology and prefer to use social sites such as facebook or twitter. I think it’s this notion that women just don’t like technology that is the most damaging. Although a lot of our users who have first used the site found the syntax confusing, many of them persevered and learned how to use mediawiki effectively.

Consequently many would contact me or report that they loved using it once they got the hang of it and would then feel a form of ownership over the pages they were creating. This would be the same intrinsic motivator that causes many of the men who contribute to Wikipedia, to continue to do so. For anyone who remembers their first edit on Wikipedia and is not a programmer themselves, they may remember it as being a little daunting. It takes time and effort to learn how to contribute properly. Something that editors on Wikipedia may not be so encouraging or forgiving of?

What I’ve unintentionally highlighted with my own site is not that women don’t like wikis or are willing to contribute to them (wikipedia’s study on the site’s usage revealed that 31% of their readers are women), but that they perhaps don’t find the site all that intuitive or appealing to edit, ergo Wikipedia you’re that really smart nerd in high school that all the cool girls secretly wanted to date but wouldn’t dare.