Only one in five French Wikipedia contributors is currently a woman, according to Rémi Mathis.
The author of the book "Wikipedia, at the heart of the largest encyclopedia in the world", guest of "Culture Médias", Thursday, evokes a "glass ceiling" to explain this problematic under-representation.
ANALYSIS
We have known for a long time that women were under-represented in Wikipedia articles, which just celebrated its 20th anniversary: only 18% of French-speaking pages relate to women, a figure on the increase thanks to the activism of the members of the "pageless" project. ".
But behind the world's largest encyclopedia, the gender gap is also yawning.
According to Rémi Mathis, author of the
Wikipedia
book
, at the heart of the world's largest encyclopedia
, this under-representation finds its source in a glass ceiling, as he explains on Europe 1, Thursday morning.
A "sexist jokes" atmosphere?
"There are indeed only 20% of women" among the contributors of the French-speaking Wikipedia, assures Rémi Mathis, historian, "wikipédien" for more than fifteen years and former president of Wikimedia France, the structure which manages the Wikipedia project.
"We are in human relationships where it is certainly a glass ceiling" which prevents women from representing a larger part of these contributors.
"
It is a real problem on the questions of diversity in the approaches on the different subjects
"
Where does this glass ceiling at the intersection of knowledge and technology find its source?
"These are really sociological questions and questions of the composition of the community, of atmosphere", recalls Rémi Mathis at the microphone of Philippe Vandel in
Culture Médias
.
"When we are 80% rather young men, it is possible that there is an atmosphere a little too 'sexist jokes', without people really realizing it", continues the contributor.
"This is something that will not particularly appeal to women and will make them stay less than men."
For the specialist of the platform, one of the most consulted sites in the world, this constitutes "a real problem on the questions of diversity in the approaches, on the various subjects".
Sociological springs
Two academics, Julia Bear (Stony Brook Business School, near New York) and Benjamin Collier (Carnegie Mellon University, Qatar), had previously addressed this problem in a study published in 2016, based on a survey conducted in 2008. Their findings: Women feel less confident in their expertise and less comfortable with changing the work of other contributors, also react more negatively to criticism.
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This subject of the under-representation of women in the development of such platforms is therefore not new.
It is not unknown to the authorities either: in 2016, the university media Harvard Business Review recalled that Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, had recognized the failure of the encyclopedia to reach 25% of women among contributors in 2015. .