Gender Imbalance in the Tech Arena

Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, had wanted it to be the “sum of all human knowledge”. Instead, it’s turned out to be the sum of all male knowledge: 91% of the people who edit Wikipedia are men! This made no sense: anyone can edit Wikipedia, so why would the numbers be so skewed?

Turns out that it’s related to the fact that far more men than women write software! But wait, that doesn’t make sense either. After all, software is a very young industry and requires brain, not brawn, and involves AC work environments, not factories or oil rigs, so shouldn’t it be more gender balanced?

And yet, some time back, when all the major tech companies in the US released numbers on their (lack of) gender diversity, the male employee percentages were staggering. Google, Apple, Twitter and Facebook all had 70% males; Yahoo had 62%; and eBay had 58%. But wait, it gets worse: for each of these companies, the “tech” jobs were even more skewed in male representation!

Ok, but what’s that got to do with the Wikipedia editors’ sex ratio, you ask. Well, it’s got a little to do with how the Edit page of Wikipedia looks:

“If you’ve ever clicked on the “Edit” tab on a Wikipedia article…Reams of code cascade down the page: curved, square and curly brackets, chevrons and underscores. It looks more like a computer program than a draft of an encyclopaedia entry. If you can see past the symbols to the bit of text you want to edit, it becomes straightforward: you put your cursor in the place you want to make a change and then type, or delete.”

Or to put it more concisely:

“All the behind-the-scenes manoeuvres that go into creating a page mean it has more in common with coding than editing a Facebook status.”

And as the tech companies’ data showed, guys outnumber girls in the programming department by a huge margin. Therefore…

But even if Wikipedia made their edit interface less “techy”, there’s the other biological difference between men and women that would still remain:

“It takes confidence to believe you have the right to write an encyclopaedia entry, something men might have in greater quantities.”

On a slightly different (and possibly controversial) note, the Asian count is almost uniformly 40% across tech companies, second only to the whites. But Apple is the outlier with Asians making only 15% of the count. Does that mean that Apple has a racial bias? Or could it be because Apple is the most creative company on the planet while Asians are not exactly known for their creativity?

I guess what I’m saying is that a skewed ratio doesn’t always have to mean bias, at either Apple or at Wikipedia.