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Bridging the Gender Gap

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Bridging the Gender Gap Bridging the Gender Gap A Report on Indian Language Wikimedia Communities February 2021 By ​Bhuvana Meenakshi Koteeswaran Edited by ​Puthiya Purayil Sneha Additional inputs/edits by​ Ambika Tandon ​and​ Sumandro Chattapadhyay The Centre for Internet and Society, India Shared under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license Introduction This study presents documentation and analysis of gender bias in Indian language Wikimedia communities. ​Wikimedia defines ‘gender bias’ on its platforms as the fact “that Wikipedia contributors are mostly male, the fact that relatively few biographies on Wikipedia are about 1 women and the concept that topics of interest to women are less well-covered.” P​ revious research has shown that this gender gap does not only result in fewer women participants in Wikimedia events or number of edits by women, but also extends to disparities in the active participation of men and women, and content about women on various Wikimedia platforms. The Wikipedia page on gender bias further notes that “In a 2018 survey covering 12 language versions of Wikipedia and some other Wikimedia Foundation projects, 90% of contributors reported their gender as male, 8.8% as female, and 1% as non-binary gender. Other studies since 2011, mostly focused on the English Wikipedia, have estimated the percentage of 2 female editors at up to 20%.” A previous study by ​Ting-Yi Chang on “Bridging the Hidden Gap”,​ supported by the Access to 3 Knowledge programme at the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS-A2K), ​ illustrated how the 4 phenomenon of gender gap and bias exists in global and regional Wikimedia communities. The study was based on interviews with prominent women contributors from Indian language 5 Wikimedia communities, which helped us understand the current discourse around ‘gender gap and bias’. ​This study reiterated that the gender bias continues to exist among Indian language Wikimedia communities and indicated the need for further research to understand its persistence. The study addresses, broadly, three thematic areas: ● Online participation, including content created by women, content about women, and their online engagement with communities. ● Offline participation by women across various Indian language communities. ● Strategies to remove barriers to sustained participation of women contributors g(including challenges with retention and infrastructural issues), and mapping the 1 “Gender Bias on Wikipedia”, Wikipedia, accessed November 29, 2020. ht​ tps://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gender_bias_on_Wikipedia&oldid=991093125 2 “Gender Bias on Wikipedia”, Wikipedia, accessed December 01, 2020. ht​ tps://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gender_bias_on_Wikipedia&oldid=991093125 3 “CIS-A2K”, Wikimedia Meta-Wiki, accessed November 27, 2020. https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=CIS-A2K&oldid=20712756 4 Ting-Yi Chang, “Bridging the Hidden Gap: Examining Female Editors’ Identity and Agency Negotiation Process within Indian W​ ikimedia Projects and Communities”,(Bachelor’s thesis., University of Toronto Scarborough, 2019) https://cis-india.org/Bridging-the-Hidden-Gap-T-Chang 5 “Wiki Project India - India Statistics”, Wikidata, accessed July 10, 2020. ht​ tps://wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Wikidata:WikiProject_India/India_statistics&oldid=1225297329 1 diversity of Wikimedia projects women are involved with, with the aim to encourage participation across more projects. 15 interviewees who are part of 13 different Indian language Wikimedia communities (including English) shared their experiences and insights on each of these themes as part of this study. Globally, there have been several initiatives of different scales by women Wikipedians, as individuals and as part of a community, to counter the gender gap through 6 7 8 active intervention. This includes Women In Red, Art+Feminism, W​ iki Loves Women, Wiki 9 Women for Women Wellbeing, G​ ender Gap Task Force (a WikiProject which addresses bias in 10 content on women and documents problems faced by women in Wikipedia), Wikimedia 11 projects and initiatives to improve content on several topics such as women artists, 12 13 14 15 feminism, w​ omen’s history, women in technology, w​ omen scientists among others. Women Wikimedians from India have also been part of organising committees for global 16 17 events such as Wiki Loves Folklore and Wiki Loves Love 2019. These efforts, undertaken between 2011 to the present, have collectively produced more content on women and scaled up women’s participation in Wikimedia projects. Background The gender gap in representation is a systemic issue globally, extending to fields such as education, health, employment, and public and political participation. A 2020 report by the World Economic Forum (WEF) points to a “31.4% average gender gap that remains to be closed globally” across key dimensions such as economic participation and opportunity, 6 “Wikipedia: Wikiproject Women in Red”, Wikipedia, accessed September 05, 2020. ht​ tps://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:WikiProject_Women_in_Red&oldid=974821153 7 ”Art + Feminism”, Wikipedia, accessed September 15, 2020. ht​ tps://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Art%2BFeminism&oldid=972372729 8 “Wikipedia:Wikiproject Wiki Loves Women”, Wikipedia, accessed December 01, 2020. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:WikiProject_Wiki_Loves_Women&oldid=917451350 9 “Wiki Women for Women Wellbeing 2018”,Wikimedia Meta-Wiki, accessed November 24, 2020. ht​ tps://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wiki_Women_for_Women_Wellbeing_2018&oldid=18644149 10 “Wikipedia:Wikiproject Countering systemic bias/ Gender gap task force”, Wikipedia, accessed October 15, 2020. htt​ ps://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:WikiProject_Countering_systemic_bias/Gender_gap_task_force&oldid=97 6429782 11 “Wikipedia:Wikiproject Women artists”, Wikipedia, accessed November 20, 2020. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:WikiProject_Women_artists&oldid=988753761 12 “Wikipedia: WikiProject Feminism”, Wikipedia, accessed October 21, 2020. htt​ ps://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:WikiProject_Feminism&oldid=984745837 13 “Wikipedia: WikiProject Women’s History”, Wikipedia, accessed February 02, 2020. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:WikiProject_Women%27s_History&oldid=971659605 14 “Wikipedia:Wikiproject Women in Technology.”, Wikipedia, accessed December 02, 2020. htt​ ps://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:WikiProject_Women_in_Technology&oldid=693454093 15 ”Wikipedia:WikiProject Women scientists”, Wikipedia, accessed November 16, 2020. htt​ ps://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:WikiProject_Women_scientists&oldid=987243054 16 “Commons: Wiki Loves Folklore”, Wikimedia Commons, accessed November 15, 2020. htt​ ps://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Commons:Wiki_Loves_Folklore&oldid=512743547 17 “Wiki Loves Love 2019”, Wikimedia Meta-Wiki, accessed March 04, 2020 htt​ ps://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wiki_Loves_Love_2019&oldid=19865865 2 18 educational attainment, health and survival, and political empowerment. The report, which has surveyed 153 countries in its current edition, highlights that political empowerment, economic participation and opportunity remain the dimensions with most disparity. Under the educational attainment index, investment in capacity building of women’s skills and talents is highlighted as one of the gaps, apart from “some occupations where women are under-utilized even if they have the needed skills''. In terms of country specific data, the report finds that “India ranks 112th on the overall Global Gender Gap Index and the country has closed two-thirds of its overall gender gap (score of 66.8%). However, the condition of women in large fringes of India’s society is precarious. It has lost four positions since the last edition of the WEF report published in 2018 despite a small score improvement, as some countries previously ranked lower than India have improved more rapidly. The economic gender gap runs particularly deep in India. The report also features data on gender disparity in skill-sets and training of women across diverse fields, with the widest gaps in STEM, AI, and technology-driven areas. The report concludes with the prediction that gender gaps could potentially be closed in 71 and a half years in South Asia. The objective of prefacing this literature review with data about the global gender gap is to reiterate that this is a systemic and evolving problem, with several intersectional variables such as race, class, caste, and geographical location among others. On collaborative, largely volunteer-driven platforms such as Wikipedia, it is difficult to accurately map the extent of gender gap and bias given these intersectional variables. Even so, the body of research in this area in over a decade continues to indicate that even with progressive strides, the online encyclopedia remains inaccessible or difficult to engage with for large sections of women. The problem of gender gap and gender bias represents a lack of gender-diversity among editors and their editing practices which leads to an imbalance in collation and representation of information on the online encyclopedia. At present, women constitute “15-20% of total contributors on Wikipedia”, based on a working assumption by Katherine 19 Maher (2019) and her team at the Wikimedia Foundation. I​ t is important to note that, a large part of the work on gender gap has focused on participation
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