Women and Their Opinions

NYTimes has an article up about the gender disparity in wikipedia contributors. Apparently only about 15% of contributors are women, with a corresponding gap in terms of content. One enlightening example given is the difference between the articles for Sex and the City and The Sopranos: Sex and the City has a single article with brief synopses while The Sopranos merits an in-depth article for each and every episode.

The article makes me think about two things. One is the general reluctance of women to speak out and give their opinions, especially when doing so involves confrontation or disagreement. I know plenty of brilliant women scientists and engineers who tend to keep quiet during discussions because they're cautious about bringing out unsubstantiated opinions, where us guys just blurt out anything that comes to mind.

There's a trite but illustrative anecdote in this TED talk that Michelle sent me on the lack of women leaders. At the end of a talk the speaker says she'll take one more question and stop, and after that final question all the women put their hands down, but a few men keep their hands up and she winds up answering a few more. In general the girls and women I know tend to be more rule-abiding and less confrontational, less willing to persist in getting what they want. I wonder how much of this is tied into fear of rejection, certainly the girls I know tend to be much more afraid of rejection than the guys. Maybe all that training we get getting shot down by girls isn't such a bad thing after all...

The other thing the article reminded me of is what I like to call the paradox of democratic participation: in open, ostensibly fully democratic social organizations decision-making gets dominated by opinionated minorities. The few people who care and are willing to push for what they want wind up getting their way. My favorite story is a (possibly apocryphal) one that we were told in government class in high school. Subsidies for a type of wool for winter coats were set at $100 dollars per farm, meaning a few cents per head for the population at large. Since a wool farmer has $100 of incentive to keep the subsidy and an individual taxpayer only a few cents to kill it, the subsidies stayed for a long time, even after most people in the US stopped using that wool for winter coats and the largest consumer turned out to be the Soviet Army.

Wikipedia it seems has run into this same kind of effect, where the vast majority of contributions are made by an opinionated minority of editors. The people who have the time and willpower to obsess about tiny details of a TV series are the ones who dominate the articles. To a certain extent this is necessary for quality control, the other problem with true democracy is that you wind up with a few people who wind up making decisions and taking responsibility because other people just don't want to do it or can't. But this also has the effect of limiting participation and reducing the active population to the obsessive few who care. Maybe that's why internet forums are dominated by blowhards and trolls, and since (generalizing, but on average true) women tend to be a small minority of the kind of person who will fight to the death over trivial details of obscure fact, that may also be a limit on their wikipedia participation.