It’s a Man’s World
By Richie Grantham, Group Strategy Director
At least, that’s the thought that crashed into my head when I stumbled across a NYTimes headline about the (staggeringly) small percentage of women who contribute to the intelligence engine known as Wikipedia.
As a reservoir of go-to-knowledge across a multitude of topics, a recent study showed that less than 15% of Wikipedia’s content is generated by women.
Why would women cede this level of intellectual authority to men?
And as a result of this imbalance in content generation, what is the world missing out on?
In a virtual world, can there be gender oppression - or just self-imposed suppression?
In an interview I conducted with Jennifer van der Meer, a member of the Woodhull Institute, I posed these questions. And this is what she had to say:
“Most women are not raised to raise their hand, grandstand, and strongly assert their opinion as fact, which is the work required to update a Wikipedia article, answer a Quora post, or structure one’s career to be invited to Davos. I believe this is learned and culturally adaptive behavior that actually affects the brain and our responses – so men that are raised this way feel deep intrinsic rewards when updating what they see as a factual truth, or seeing their name listed with world leaders. Whereas if you ask women, off the record, why they never updated a Wikipedia article, or write a book, or an OpEd they say, ‘meh, I never had the desire to. Not my cup of tea.’ But that doesn’t get us off the hook. What we can do as women is be more intentional about the world we want to live in, and how we define success.”
I followed this train of thought with a conversation with my social media colleague, Sienna Farris.
“In the social media space, there are obviously less women attending events or conferences. Especially in the early days, it was much more male dominated. And while it’s getting better. I think back to then. You just felt more exposed. More vulnerable. And thought people may not take you more seriously.”
My own empathy on this topic manifests itself in an unusual way…
It’s about one of my own hidden geekdoms: I love comic book blogs. They are insatiable brain candy for me. Yet, given this passion point, how often I have I participated in a comic book forum on a superhero discussion thread I have extensive “knowledge” on? Maybe three times in total? And I remember the sensation of each of those posts: pure anxiety. Is a level of ingrained sensitivity - like my own - in putting yourself out there and making a declarative statement to a potentially critical community the reason behind this unusual gender gap?
