As a nerd who considers myself part of many nerd spaces, I am ashamed and my conscience is disturbed by how unwelcoming all kinds of nerd spaces tend to be towards women. Wikipedia editors, for example. They're definitely nerds. They stick to strict checklists about style and word choice, strict checklists about article structure and layout, strict checklists about what is and isn't notable (i.e. worthy of being made into an article). They should be immune to this, or at least highly resistant. And yet scholarly articles and studies are written showing that the gender gap exists on Wikipedia as it does everywhere else. Why do nerd spaces which actively try to not be sexist still end up being sexist? It baffles me.
(Edit: By "unwelcoming" I don't mean just "participation ratio is skewed". A space can have a dramatically unbalanced gender ratio but still be welcoming to both genders. I mean that Wikipedia articles about women tend to have higher standards for being created, and that lots of women feel alienated by the Wikipedia editing community. I apologize for the lack of clarity.)
Do you have a specific falsifiable theory on how specifically the nerd places are unwelcoming towards women? Without a specific theory, it is not obvious what specifically could be done. Pointless self-flagellation is not helping anyone.
One possibility is that women are simply statistically less interested in these kinds of activities. I am not saying that this is definitely the full answer. But it's an example of a possible cause that has no one to blame.
I am a man and I feel unwelcome at Wikipedia recently. (I wrote about it repeatedly on ACX, but I can'... (read more)
By the "gender gap" I was not referring to the fact that only 20% of Wikipedia editors were female, but the fact that the writing of Wikipedia feels male-centric despite the fact that strict checklists and style guidelines should stop the writing from feeling any particular way.
8Zack_M_Davis
So, one hypothesis might be that participation gaps are caused by something else other than sexism?
One might object: that hypothesis is itself sexist, such that voicing it is itself perpetrating the inequality via self-fulfilling prophecy. This is admittedly a tricky methodology problem.