After reading the post below, I have nothing to add to today's extensive dialog about men's and women's participation, but I have decided to block Greg Maxwell indefinitely for hate speech against blondes.
Newyorkbrad On 6/16/10, Gregory Maxwell <[email protected]> wrote: > On Wed, Jun 16, 2010 at 8:26 PM, phoebe ayers <[email protected]> wrote: >> There's been discussion of the gender gap among Wikimedia editors on >> and off for many years now, and it's a focus of the strategic planning >> process. This is a part of a larger issue of how to get members of >> underrepresented groups to edit more, to combat system bias on all >> fronts. (Or, simply how to get more people to edit regardless). > > You may find it interesting that these kind of large imbalances can > arise out of a simple but surprising mathematical truth: > > If you have a mixed population with a skill, say skateboarding, that > follows the typical normal distribution and one sub-population (e.g. > people with red hair) have an average performance only slight higher > than another sub-population (blondes), and you were to select the > best skateboarders out of the group you would end up with a > surprisingly high concentration of the red-hair subgroup, so high that > it doesn't at all seem justified by the small difference in average > performance. > > This is is because in normal distributions the concentration of people > with a particular skill falls off exponentially away from the average, > so if you take the two distributions (amount of skateboarding skill > for red-hairs and blondes) and shift one a very small amount the ratio > between the two becomes increasingly large as you select for higher > and higher skill levels. > > The same kind of results happen when, instead of a difference in > average performance, there is simply a difference in the variation. If > red-hairs have the same average skate-boarding skill but are less > consistent— more klutzes _and_ more superstars this has an even larger > impact than differences in the average, again biasing towards the > red-hairs. > > These effects can be combined, and if there are multiple supporting > skills for a task they combine multiplicatively.[*] > > The applicability here is clear: There is a strong biological argument > justifying greater variance in genetically linked traits in men (due > to the decrease in genetic redundancy) which is supported by many > studies which show greater variance in males. So all things equal any > time you select for extremes (high or low performing) you will tend to > tend to end up with a male biased group. (There are small also > differences in measured averages between men and women in many > areas...) > > And many of the 'skills' that are reasonable predictions of someone's > likelihood of being a Wikipedian, if we're even to call them 'skills' > as many aren't all that flattering, are obviously male super-abundant > in the greater world. How many female obsessive stamp collectors do > you know? Male? The kind of obsessive collecting trait is almost so > exclusively male that it's a cliché, and it's pretty obvious why that > kind of person would find a calling in Wikipedia. > > One piece of insight that comes out of is that general approaches > which make Wikipedia more palatable to "average people", as opposed to > uber-obsessive techobibilo walking-fact-machines, may have a greater > impact at reducing gender imbalance than female centric improvements. > (and may also reduce other non-gender related imbalances, such as our > age imbalance). So this gives you an extra reason why "more people to > edit regardless" is an especially useful approach. > > > > Though are limits to the amount of main-streaming you can do of an > academic activity such as encyclopaedia writing. :-) > > In any case, I don't mean to suggest that your work isn't important or > can't be worthwhile. Only that I think you're fighting an uphill > battle against a number of _natural_ (not human originated) biases, > and I wish you luck! > > > > [*] A while back I wrote up a longer and highly technical version of > this explanation as part of an argument on gender imbalances in > computer science with a mathematician. Anyone into math-wankery may > find it interesting: > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Gmaxwell/mf_compsci > > _______________________________________________ > foundation-l mailing list > [email protected] > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l > _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
