2019:Research/Gender Equality in Wikipedia: What can we learn from Behavioral Economics
 | This is an Accepted submission for the Research space at Wikimania 2019. |
Abstract[edit | edit source]
The Wikipedia gender gap, i.e., the fact that only 10 to 15% of Wikipedia contributors are reported to be female, has long been acknowledged within the Wikipedia community. It implies that there is a large and untapped pool of potential contributors. While Wikipedia aspires to represent "the sum of all human knowledge", this gap also causes important flaws and biases in its encyclopedic content.
Over the past years, a number of community initiatives have tried to raise awareness around this important issue (e.g., the Gender Gap Task Force WikiProject). Thanks to the efforts of many dedicated community members (e.g., the Women Scientists WikiProject), biases in Wikipedia content are now increasingly documented, and start to be addressed. Still, the participation gap itself remains.
In this talk, I will present insights from the past decade of research on the behavioral economics of gender -- a scientific literature concerned with the identification of the underlying psychological drivers of gender differences in occupational choices and labor market outcomes. I will show how those results speak to the specific issues we face in online peer production spaces such as Wikipedia, and suggest novel ideas as to how the community could move forward trying to eliminate the gender participation gap.
Authors[edit | edit source]
Jérôme Hergueux (French National Center for Scientific Research)
Session type[edit | edit source]
22-min presentation.
Participants [subscribe here!][edit | edit source]
- Trying to come! Nemo (talk) 09:44, 17 August 2019 (UTC)
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