Course-v1:edz+11+2023 SP/en/block-v1:edz+11+2023 SP+type@html+block@dd5efb9e1a494beda3f0bd4e681afad3
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| display_name | "Identifying constructive ways to work on the gender gap" | |||||||||
| content | "<p></p> <table style="width: 100%;"> <tbody style="width: 100%;"> <tr> <td style="width: 30%; padding-left: 30px; background-color: #71d1b3;"> <p></p> <p></p> <p> <img height="100%" src="/static/Wikimedia_Brand_Guidelines_Update_2022_-_Wikidata.svg" alt="" style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" /></p> <p></p> <p><img height="100%" src="/static/Art-and-feminism.svg" alt="" /></p> </td> <td style="padding-top: 3%; background-color: #ffffff;"> <blockquote> <p style="padding-left: 30px; padding-right: 30px; text-align: left;">Identifying constructive ways to work on the gender gap has been challenging: a <a href="https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2018/09/21/advancing-gender-equity-conversations-with-movement-leaders/" target="_blank">2018 report by the Wikimedia Foundation</a> found systemic bias and social dynamics damaging effective participation of women at many different levels in the movement. When women do start participating, they face many more barriers to participation than men, mostly created by the social conditions of the wiki and the movement.</p> <p style="padding-left: 30px; padding-right: 30px; text-align: left;">Following in the model of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Women_in_Red" target="_blank">Women in Red</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art%2BFeminism" target="_blank">Art+Feminism</a>, many community groups have started addressing the knowledge gap with women’s biographies. Biographies are an appealing place to start: they are easy to write, engaging to research, and once a culture of writing women’s biographies exists on a wiki, easy to defend against deletion discussions. Moreover, because Women’s biographies are easy to measure compared to more complicated metrics (i.e. citations of works by women), that content gap has dominated the discussions both publicly and within the movement (i.e. see the <a href="https://whgi.wmflabs.org/" target="_blank">WHGI dashboard</a>) .</p> <p style="padding-left: 30px; padding-right: 30px; text-align: left;">Despite good efforts by some parts of the Wikimedia movement, the gender gap has persisted. There is limited evidence that the content created as part of Gender Gap initiatives has affected system change -- in part because these reader and contributors gaps are hard to measure, and in part because the biographies only move the needle on one subset of reader, contributor and content gaps.</p> <p style="padding-left: 30px; padding-right: 30px; text-align: left;">There has not been significant research on why we have far fewer women readers, and many of the other metrics for representation of women in content (citations to women, coverage of topics that suggest women readership on other platforms, and links to women within Wikipedia articles) point towards a need to run other kinds of content interventions.</p> <p style="padding-left: 30px; padding-right: 30px; text-align: left;">All these put us in a challenging position: <em>given that adding women’s biographies is not a sufficient fix to close the gender gap, how do we address the full complexity of the problem?</em></p> <p style="padding-left: 30px; padding-right: 30px; text-align: left;">The difficulty of finding high impact approaches to filling knowledge gaps effects all kinds of topics on Wikimedia projects; through this section we will look at some approaches that have been used by organizers to identify potential places for impact and in future Units we will discuss the process of inviting people to fill those gaps.</p> <p style="padding-left: 30px; padding-right: 30px; text-align: left;"></p> </blockquote> </td> </tr> </tbody> </table>" |