As a nerd who considers myself part of many nerd spaces, I am ashamed and my conscience is disturbed by how unwelcoming all kinds of nerd spaces tend to be towards women. Wikipedia editors, for example. They’re definitely nerds. They stick to strict checklists about style and word choice, strict checklists about article structure and layout, strict checklists about what is and isn’t notable (i.e. worthy of being made into an article). They should be immune to this, or at least highly resistant. And yet scholarly articles and studies are written showing that the gender gap exists on Wikipedia as it does everywhere else. Why do nerd spaces which actively try to not be sexist still end up being sexist? It baffles me.
(Edit: By “unwelcoming” I don’t mean just “participation ratio is skewed”. A space can have a dramatically unbalanced gender ratio but still be welcoming to both genders. I mean that Wikipedia articles about women tend to have higher standards for being created, and that lots of women feel alienated by the Wikipedia editing community. I apologize for the lack of clarity.)
So, one hypothesis might be that participation gaps are caused by something else other than sexism?
One might object: that hypothesis is itself sexist, such that voicing it is itself perpetrating the inequality via self-fulfilling prophecy. This is admittedly a tricky methodology problem.
Is there evidence that this is caused by sexism and not differences in interest? I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a gender gap in how much people (on average) enjoy going through strict checklists to decide if an article is notable.
By the “gender gap” I was not referring to the fact that only 20% of Wikipedia editors were female, but the fact that the writing of Wikipedia feels male-centric despite the fact that strict checklists and style guidelines should stop the writing from feeling any particular way.
Do you have a specific falsifiable theory on how specifically the nerd places are unwelcoming towards women? Without a specific theory, it is not obvious what specifically could be done. Pointless self-flagellation is not helping anyone.
One possibility is that women are simply statistically less interested in these kinds of activities. I am not saying that this is definitely the full answer. But it’s an example of a possible cause that has no one to blame.
I am a man and I feel unwelcome at Wikipedia recently. (I wrote about it repeatedly on ACX, but I can’t find the comments. Long story short, Wikipedia used to accept short articles, that were extended later by other authors. Now they expect the first submission to be perfect, with many sources establishing notability etc. In my opinion that goes against the entire concept of a collaborative wiki. I am happy to write a few paragraphs, but as an unpaid volunteer I am not going to spend hours polishing an article that an unknown stranger may judge and reject.) So the fact that some women feel unwelcome is not necessarily a proof of sexism.
Many activities aimed at making places welcoming for women are based on “something must be done; X is something; therefore X must be done” logic. Some of them have the opposite effect. For example, they highlight the women who are already in the community as something weird (if you insist that a place makes women feel unwelcome, that logically implies that the women who feel welcome are somehow abnormal), which may be unpleasant for them. Advertising that a community has not enough women can become a self-fulfilling prophecy: a women curious about something may decide to avoid it if she is helpfully told by the media that she would feel unwelcome. The very hypothesis that “X makes women feel good, but Y makes them feel bad” is alienating for those women who happen to like Y and have X. Also, such hypotheses are often sexist themselves: imagine someone proposing that LessWrong needs more pink color and pictures of cute kittens, to be more appealing to women. Many proposals to make places welcome to women are based on what neurotypical women might statistically want, but that may be irrelevant for nerdy women in the same way as things attractive to neurotypical men might be irrelevant for nerdy men.
tl;dr—without a specific testable theory, it is easy to actually do harm while trying to fix things
As a nerd who considers myself part of many nerd spaces, I am ashamed and my conscience is disturbed by how unwelcoming all kinds of nerd spaces tend to be towards women. Wikipedia editors, for example. They’re definitely nerds. They stick to strict checklists about style and word choice, strict checklists about article structure and layout, strict checklists about what is and isn’t notable (i.e. worthy of being made into an article). They should be immune to this, or at least highly resistant. And yet scholarly articles and studies are written showing that the gender gap exists on Wikipedia as it does everywhere else. Why do nerd spaces which actively try to not be sexist still end up being sexist? It baffles me.
(Edit: By “unwelcoming” I don’t mean just “participation ratio is skewed”. A space can have a dramatically unbalanced gender ratio but still be welcoming to both genders. I mean that Wikipedia articles about women tend to have higher standards for being created, and that lots of women feel alienated by the Wikipedia editing community. I apologize for the lack of clarity.)
So, one hypothesis might be that participation gaps are caused by something else other than sexism?
One might object: that hypothesis is itself sexist, such that voicing it is itself perpetrating the inequality via self-fulfilling prophecy. This is admittedly a tricky methodology problem.
Is there evidence that this is caused by sexism and not differences in interest? I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a gender gap in how much people (on average) enjoy going through strict checklists to decide if an article is notable.
By the “gender gap” I was not referring to the fact that only 20% of Wikipedia editors were female, but the fact that the writing of Wikipedia feels male-centric despite the fact that strict checklists and style guidelines should stop the writing from feeling any particular way.
Do you have a specific falsifiable theory on how specifically the nerd places are unwelcoming towards women? Without a specific theory, it is not obvious what specifically could be done. Pointless self-flagellation is not helping anyone.
One possibility is that women are simply statistically less interested in these kinds of activities. I am not saying that this is definitely the full answer. But it’s an example of a possible cause that has no one to blame.
I am a man and I feel unwelcome at Wikipedia recently. (I wrote about it repeatedly on ACX, but I can’t find the comments. Long story short, Wikipedia used to accept short articles, that were extended later by other authors. Now they expect the first submission to be perfect, with many sources establishing notability etc. In my opinion that goes against the entire concept of a collaborative wiki. I am happy to write a few paragraphs, but as an unpaid volunteer I am not going to spend hours polishing an article that an unknown stranger may judge and reject.) So the fact that some women feel unwelcome is not necessarily a proof of sexism.
Many activities aimed at making places welcoming for women are based on “something must be done; X is something; therefore X must be done” logic. Some of them have the opposite effect. For example, they highlight the women who are already in the community as something weird (if you insist that a place makes women feel unwelcome, that logically implies that the women who feel welcome are somehow abnormal), which may be unpleasant for them. Advertising that a community has not enough women can become a self-fulfilling prophecy: a women curious about something may decide to avoid it if she is helpfully told by the media that she would feel unwelcome. The very hypothesis that “X makes women feel good, but Y makes them feel bad” is alienating for those women who happen to like Y and have X. Also, such hypotheses are often sexist themselves: imagine someone proposing that LessWrong needs more pink color and pictures of cute kittens, to be more appealing to women. Many proposals to make places welcome to women are based on what neurotypical women might statistically want, but that may be irrelevant for nerdy women in the same way as things attractive to neurotypical men might be irrelevant for nerdy men.
tl;dr—without a specific testable theory, it is easy to actually do harm while trying to fix things