A recent study conducted by Wikimedia Foundation and reported on in the The New York Times highlights a severe gap between men and women contributors to entries on Wikipedia. According to the study, only 13% of contributors, those who write and edit all the entries on Wikipedia, are women. The Times makes an argument that it is possibly the very openness of Wikipedia that is that is the cause of this problem.
But because of its early contributors Wikipedia shares many characteristics with the hard-driving hacker crowd, says Joseph Reagle, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard. This includes an ideology that resists any efforts to impose rules or even goals like diversity, as well as a culture that may discourage women. “It is ironic,” he said, “because I like these things — freedom, openness, egalitarian ideas — but I think to some extent they are compounding and hiding problems you might find in the real world.” Adopting openness means being “open to very difficult, high-conflict people, even misogynists,” he said, “so you have to have a huge argument about whether there is the problem.” Mr. Reagle is also the author of “Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia.”
Reagle’s argument here, however, brings to mind a number of the arguments one encounters around the gender gaps inherent in the traditional understanding of the “public sphere.” As we read in the Wikipedia entry for “the public sphere,” feminists like Nancy Fraser and Seyla Benhabib pointed out way before the Internet was a regular part of our lives that the public sphere has always been a male-dominated space that uses a masculine hegemonic ideology to push what is considered of “woman’s interest” (this designation in and of itself being determined by men) into the private realm, creating a boundary (a region, perhaps, in the Goffmannian sense) between what is and what is not worth discussing. Hence, if we take Wikipedia and other open, collaborative Web 2.0 websites as inheritors of Habermas’s public sphere, then Joseph Reagle’s analysis seems to push the historical causes of the gender gap in Wikipedia contributors up about 2500 years.
I think Fraser is an interesting scholar to bring to bear on this issue, and I note her “subaltern counter publics” on the question openness and the WikiChix list (e.g., in chapter 4 of my book). However, I’m not sure what you mean by that I seem to “push the historical causes of the gender gap in Wikipedia contributors up about 2500 years.” I am arguing that despite decades of work on bias in technology-related fields an imbalance in participation not only persists, but is exacerbated in communities founded upon the liberal values of freedom and openness.
Thanks for commenting on the class blog, Joseph! My statement about “2500 years” was meant to be provocative and start a conversation in class on a number of issues related to the public sphere as a theoretical construct and the gendering of participation in it throughout history. Particularly, my point was to argue that maybe the gender gap in contributions to Wikipedia might have more to do with patriarchy and its continuing power in realms that are understood to be “public” and “open” than with any other causal factor. My attempt was to look at this particular gender gap with a historical lens. In class, we went back to the Greek city-state’s (hence the 2500 years) separation between the oikos and polis, how these were gendered, and how participation in the polis entailed an independence from the day-to-day workings of the oikos. We then discussed how maybe this could be understood, in light of Fraser’s critique of Habermas and other (particularly Marxist) feminist’s critiques of a universal rational subject, as part of a historically constituted patriarchal regime that might contribute to gender gaps in a lot of things having to do with knowledge production. I think its important to note the historical development, and consistency, of systems oppression in the face of new technologies that are often lauded as evidence that these systems are ending. I didn’t mean to denigrate your argument, by any means. I just wanted to add a longer historical view to it.