Thoughts on the online encyclopedia’s gender imbalance

By Andreas Kolbe, with contributions from Nathalie Collida

Wikipedia is notorious for having a sizeable gender imbalance. As Guardian feature writer Anne Perkins put it – somewhat cattily – in a recent article, the site is dominated by “young white western males with a slight personality defect”. Most of them are single and childless. Indeed, as we shall shortly see, many are still children themselves.

Wikipedia demographics

The 2010 United Nations University survey was the largest survey examining Wikipedia demographics to date. It had a total of 176,192 respondents, of which almost 60,000 identified as current (or former) Wikipedia contributors; the remaining respondents were Wikipedia readers. The survey reported that –

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Overall, the average age of the Wikipedians that participated in the survey is 25.22 years. Half of the respondents are younger than 22 years. The most frequent age that can be observed within the respondents is 18 years. Splitting the respondents in four equally large age groups shows that 25% are younger than 18 years old, 25% are between 18 and 22, a further 25% are between 22 and 30 (e.g. half of the respondents are between 18 and 30 years) and the remaining 25% are between 30 and 85 years old. There is a slight age difference between readers and contributors – readers are, on average, 24.79 years old while contributors show an average age of 26.14 years. Finally, female respondents are younger (23.79 years) than male ones (25.69 years). […]

Contributors show a substantially larger share of males than readers. Among respondents only 12.64% of contributors are female.

This gender imbalance has long vexed the Wikimedia Foundation. In January 2011, in response to a New York Times article by Noam

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