Tag Archives: LIB 3040

A recent episode of the Freakonomics podcast, “Women Are Not Men,” looked at gender inequities in various arenas. I thought the discussion of why women are less likely to be editors and contributors to Wikipedia raises some interesting issues about how the construction of knowledge is complicated by culturally-bound notions of whether competitiveness is essentially a male or a female trait. After pointing to a study documenting the dramatically lower participation levels of women in Wikipedia editing, the hosts of the podcast moved on to look at studies of how competitiveness is gendered in a patriarchal society and a matriarchal one.

I can’t wait to figure out how I’ll use this in LIB 3040 this semester.