Communication Styles Make a Difference

I was not surprised to read that 87 percent of contributors to Wikipedia are men. I’ve been researching gender dynamics in Internet communication for 20 years, starting with mailing lists back before there was even a World Wide Web, and the Wikipedia gender imbalance is consistent with observations from my research, dating back to my very first study on the topic in 1992.

In that study, I investigated the reasons for women’s low rate of participation in an online discussion list for academic linguists. Linguistics is a field in which more than 50 percent of the Ph.D.s are earned by women, and women made up close to 40 percent of the subscribers to this particular list. The fact that they contributed less than 15 percent of the content to the discussions, even on topics of broad general interest to professional linguists, seemed anomalous. Then — like now — claims proliferated about the inherently democratic nature of online communication.

I conducted an online survey of members of the list, asking them if they posted messages to the list, and if not, why not? I thought that there might be several reasons why women contributed less: they were too busy (e.g., with teaching or family responsibilities); they were less interested than men in the topics of discussion; or they were intimidated by the tone of the discourse on the list, which was often contentious. The results showed that:

— Fewer women than men said they were too busy.

— Far fewer women than men said they weren’t interested in the topics of discussion.

Both men and women said their main reason for not participating was because they were intimidated by the tone of the discussions, though women gave this reason more often than men did. Women were also more negative about the tone of the list. Whereas men tended to say that they found the “slings and arrows” that list members posted “entertaining” (as long as they weren’t directed at them), women reported that the antagonistic exchanges made them want to unsubscribe from the list. One women said it made her want to drop out of the field of linguistics altogether.

Wikipedia, like the linguist list, is a site where discourse is not infrequently contentious. On ‘talk’ pages, where the process of article creation is hashed out, one’s contributions are often challenged, and some contributors, anonymous and otherwise, use rude and haranguing language. Such environments are — if not outright intimidating — unappealing to many women.

The similarities go beyond contentiousness. Both Wikipedia and the linguist list are knowledge focused, and it’s a popular stereotype that men are believed to know more “hard facts,” while women are better at nurturing and getting along with people. I evaluated this stereotype in another study, in which I found that women in online academic discussion forums actually posted somewhat more factual messages than men.

However, men tended to assert their opinions as “facts,” whereas women tended to phrase their informative messages as suggestions, offers, and other non-assertive acts. In other words, the gender difference was in their communication styles, not in the actual informativeness of their contributions.

Wikipedia, however, doesn’t allow for the non-assertive style preferred by many women. Rather, it enforces a “neutral point of view” policy, which favors a more masculine style of communication — just the facts, ma’am. And of course the creation and editing of knowledge repositories, as evidenced in the tradition of print encyclopedias, has always been dominated by men.

The encyclopedic nature of Wikipedia, combined with its rigid adherence to a “neutral” point of view, are factors that might make women less inclined to contribute.

Finally, Wikipedia, like most multi-participant online environments, is public. Men traditionally populate the public domain, whether it be in politics, religion, or on the Internet. They tend to feel a greater sense of entitlement to occupy public space. This is reflected in my finding that men regularly post longer messages to online discussion forums than women do, and they rarely apologize for message length, even when they go on for 20 screens, whereas women apologize even for short messages. Some women may lack the confidence to contribute to Wikipedia or feel that it would be presumptuous of them to do so.

Yet plenty of women participate in public Internet communication. Many women blog, for example, and more than half of users of social network sites are female. It is no coincidence, I think, that both those technologies have a feature that Wikipedia and discussion forums have traditionally lacked: the ability to control the communication.

Bloggers can delete comments or disallow commenting altogether. The “walled garden” model on which Facebook is based allows women (and men) to choose who can read and contribute; flamers and harassers can be filtered out. There, as nowhere previously online, women share information, but they also socialize and support one another.

Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook, recently declared that the future of knowledge sharing on the Internet is social recommendation — people will trust information more if someone they know and like is associated with it. If this is so, the Wikipedia model of neutral facts concentrated in a single site may some day be superseded by knowledge-sharing environments with women as the primary contributors.

But I’m not holding my breath.