I don't often work on quantitative projects, but since publishing Gender Bias in Wikipedia and Brittanica with Lauren Rhue I've come to appreciate just how difficult it can be to communicate findings unambiguously. Of course, had we found that Wikipedia had no biographies of women that would be ...
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Free as in Sexist?: Free Culture and the Gender Gap
First Monday's 200th issue is up (I first published there 17 years ago!) and includes "Free as in Sexist?: Free Culture and the Gender Gap".
Despite the values of freedom and openness, the free culture movement’s gender balance is as skewed (or more so) as that of the ...
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Ruby UK Conference and White Men
The British Ruby Conference was canceled [andrewnez2012brc] after the composition of the speakers list, 100% white men, was noted and discussed on twitter [Susser2012nsl]. The ensuing discussion touched upon:
the merits of meritocracy (e.g., the call was open, the best were invited)
in/out-group dynamics (e.g., this should ...
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Gender in F/LOSS
Dawn Nafus has published an excellent paper entitled “Patches Don’t Have Gender”: What is not Open in Open Source Software. When I read it, I did so with some trepidation as I feared it might render my draft Free as in Sexist redundant. However, while we make a similar ...
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Keeping up? Fun or work?
In Nafus’ piece on Patches Don’t Have Gender there is a statement that initially puzzled me. Nafus writes:
New programming languages similarly proliferate at a rate that confounds everyone involved…. We experienced exactly this problem in learning to participate in the F/LOSS community in Paris. What at first ...
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Is the Internet convincing women not to study computer science?
I recently encountered Beth Andres-Beck’s (2012) interesting note asking is reading the Internet convincing women not to study computer science? I find her affirmative conclusion compelling as she shows:
an increasing gap in interest in C.S. between men and women post-Internet (1996) in the U.S.;
a negative ...
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Female Internet pioneers: A history yet to be done
Legal scholars have a saying that hard cases (i.e., unusual/confused) make bad law (i.e., legal decisions). The recent lead in a story about sexual harassment in IT venture capital is probably a poor case for me to write something sensible. But the claim that “men invented the ...
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Gender Bias in Wikipedia and Britannica
The International Journal of Communication has published Lauren Rhue's and my paper on "Gender Bias in Wikipedia and Britannica". The method of crawling the sites, the large size of the comparison, and the guessing of genders were interesting technical challenges that once addressed permitted us to write:
Abstract: Is ...
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Web exceptionalism: gender
As part of the fellows program at the Berkman Center this semester is a weekly discussion period that has the theme of Web Exceptionalism, the "belief (or attitude) that the Web is a significant break in the course of history, fundamentally changing institutions, norms, behaviors... It is not always proposed ...