 Good night. I edit as user Rosie Step, and I want to talk about advancing gender equity and tell you about the Gender Diversity Mapping Project, which was a strategic new initiative in 2017, whose aim was to support gender diversity across the Wikimedia community. While we know the Wikimedia communities have been working on gender equity and gender diversity projects for a long time, the study we did last year focused on the period of June 2016 to June 2017. So what does advancing gender equity mean? And how does this relate to our work in the Wikimedia movement? Well, in short, it means in addition to eliminating barriers, taking down walls and gates, it also means building bridges. I think some of you are in this photo. You might remember that we took this photo in 2017 in Berlin at the Wikimedia conference when we had a Wiki women meetup. And that was the day that we launched this project. It came out of a collective sense that there are so many Wikimedians working on addressing gender diversity issues and lots of great experiences and lessons learned. Wikimu Harris, you and her story, women in red, art and feminism, so on and so forth, that we didn't have a very clear picture of everything we were doing and where we had struggles and where things were going well. At a glance, you can see that we did 65 interviews. 29 countries were represented, 26 languages. Thank you, Maria, for the map and for this one as well. This one depicts the language communities. This is regions and countries. Let's talk about goal or goals. Over the last year, I presented on this topic a number of times. And those presentations covered the seven main themes that we were able to draw out of the research. Like I had said, we had over 2,500 data points. But we were able to get, the foundation was able to find a wonderful person who reviewed the data, analyzed it, and was helpful with developing a final report. I'll give you a link to that report at the end. So let's start with what is gender? What became clear in our conversations is that gender is subject to multiple and sometimes contradictory definitions across cultural contexts. Even among Wikimedia's gender diversity leader, there was no clear definition. And so we found that there was going to be some bias in the way that we could analyze the data. When we refer to gender, we are employing a social and cultural, not a biological term. The concept of gender is subject to complex nuances in its meaning. During this mapping project, a lack of common definitions around key vocabulary made it difficult to come up with some of our conclusions. Here's a direct quote. I didn't really understand the entire concept of transgender until I started working with Wikimedians. And I've learned a lot from working with people who identify in a different way than I do. And it's helped me outside of the Wiki Movement too. Envisioning changes. The interviewees for this report are among the most active leaders advancing gender equity on Wikimedia. Interviewees initiated many projects to implement their vision of greater gender equity on Wikimedia projects. Some examples, you and women, her story, women in red, women scientists, and the Kailana effect. Wiki loves women, edit atanas, and so on and so forth. Measuring the impact, though, of gender diversity efforts is difficult. We can relatively easily track and measure impact in terms of content on the Wikimedia projects, but understanding changes in participation, community health, and the more transformational aspects of this work is a challenge. However, we do know that it is happening. I like to say that if someone participates in something to do with gender, be it an online or offline editing event, I hope they had a good time while they were doing it because then they become evangelists. They're gonna go talk to their mother, their grandmother, their aunt, their niece, their next-door neighbor, and so on and so forth, and hopefully, by saying good things, it will encourage somebody else to become an editor. What is working? We know that off-wiki events, in-person events, are working. We know that partnerships are working. Partnerships are a powerful way to align Wikimedians with people that are experts in and passionate about gender equity issues. Our interviewees emphasize that partnerships led to more and better quality content that is relevant to the communities it is about, that partnerships provide access to valuable sources, that much structured, that more structured support systems arise through partnerships. Filling gaps in tracking progress are motivated by content gaps, inclusion practices. Because of the barriers to equity that exist in the Wikimedia context, effective inclusion of marginalized groups is important. When asked about communication strategies for their gender diversity projects, 78% of the interviewees said they prefer off-wiki communication methods like email, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Snapchat. Barriers to equity, well, what are the issues? We asked interviewees to name one or two issues they see as the most critical obstacles to achieving gender equity in the Wikimedia movement. Across all 65 interviewees, here are the top three responses that surface. Number one, barrier. Bias in policies. 20% of interviewees identified bias in policies on Wikimedia projects as the most detrimental way to being able to do their work. Interviewees offered critical feedback about the way that those policies reinforced the biases of the larger culture within Wikimedia projects. Consequently, social groups subject to negative bias are not permitted full and accurate representation in encyclopedia articles. Here are some of the comments. I'll go ahead and read this one. There is a dogmatic view on neutrality, notability, and reliability. Wikimedia's organizing policies are principles of the minority of the world. White men sitting in North America and Europe. So whenever anyone challenges these, those organizing principles are thrown back as weapons of mass oppression. And one thing I will encourage you at this point, please don't try to guess where this person might be from, because I will tell you you would be surprised if you really knew who it might have been. Barrier number two, lack of awareness of gender bias. 18% of the interviewees identified a lack of awareness of gender bias within the community as the most challenging obstacle they face when interviewees explained what makes this lack of awareness challenging. Their stories were not about a straightforward lack of, sorry, sorry. Barrier number three, poor community health. May I interject, I am so happy I am on the community health working group. Poor community health, which includes but is not limited to harassment, lack of support for gender equity, lack of diversity in leadership. And these are also things that were brought up by the presenters before me. Though there is variation across contexts, a majority of interviewees describe a lack of adequate support for gender equality work. Many interviewees communicated a sense of isolation within the larger we're committing community. I remember I can hear the person's voice. I remember the interviewee who said this, when you contacted me, I was so glad. It made me realize how low a priority gender diversity was in my community. Though I am hopeless in my community that there will be change, maybe this, as in this study, will influence one person somewhere to contribute on this subject. And then someone else said, we have to deal with pushback from our community. Women don't want to expose themselves on issues such as this. The lack of diversity in leadership, and this is leadership in various forms, leadership within affiliates, leadership within editing communities, things like the administrators and bureaucrats, stewards, but not just that. It's the people who we know are influential in your editing community. 78% of the interviewees said that leadership in the Wikimedia movement is unbalanced in its representation of genders. Governance was broadly defined affiliate leadership on Wikimedia admins, other forms of community leadership throughout the movement, the future. The future is hopefully bright. Where does that leave us? Where are we going? These are provocative questions about how we can make strides in gender equity. We're looking for ideas, your ideas to inspire folks of where we go next to address some of the big issues laid out, or what kind of support that's not working can be provided. Here's the link I was telling you about to the final report, and I'll go ahead and take questions now. Questions, anyone? No questions. Okay, we have one question here, please. I was wondering, you shared a slide about the future and you briefly mentioned that you need ideas or input about what to do next or where to take this next. And I was wondering if there's a space where people can either sign up or if there are any plans on taking this next step somewhere else or where, yeah, where can people offer their ideas? Great question, Maria. One of the things you can do is provide your ideas at the community health and diversity working groups that are forming right now. You don't necessarily have to be a member of the working group, the working group has talk page and you can put your ideas there. You can also go to this report and you can see if there's something there you wanna comment on and go ahead and include the comment either, like I said, this was created by Alex Wang, Maria Cruz, Sati Houston and myself, and you can go ahead and get ahold of us, send us an email or reach out to us using any form of communication that you prefer and give us your thoughts we wanna hear from you. It's the only way we're going to make change. So, Erin Haffiger, researcher at Wikimedia Foundation. So, I'm curious about the kind of leadership roles that people take on around our movement. So, there's really only one study I know that looked at the gender prevalence among administrators and actually suggested that considering the gender gap among editors, there is a higher than expected proportion of administrators in English Wikipedia that identify as female than you would expect. So, in that case, they're sort of over represented as the wrong word, but it seems like an interesting sort of situation. It's definitely unexpected. And so, I'm wondering, like when you're talking to leaders in these sort of communities, if they offered any insights for why that might be? Like, is it an outlier? Is this common? Is there something that's working but only for the subset that make it up to that high threshold? I remember the study you're referring to on English Wikipedia and that is true, but we spoke with women leaders from all over the world. So, representing 25 other languages and that's not accurate in the other languages. So, it's a phenomenon we should study. The researchers out here could study. And then take a more broad brushstroke and think about who are, if some of you are members of affiliates, how is your board made up? And who is your executive director and who are your officers and so on? And then think about the people who are influential in your language, Wikipedia, they might not be an administrator, they might not hold any particular office or have any particular additional tools, but we know who these people are or do we have a significant amount of women? And if we don't, what can we do to encourage and mentor them? I'm gonna use the words imposter syndrome. I've heard several women in the wiki movement say I suffer from imposter syndrome and that's why I haven't volunteered to do X or Y or Z. And someone who historically has suffered from it too, though I promise my sons, I would say that I've kicked that out the door. I can say that unless we encourage women to take roles of leadership, some of them will just think I'm not good enough and they won't raise their hand or volunteer on their own. Question in the front row? Oh, sorry. Hi, Rosie. I just have something to say that we need to be very critical of research and be very wary of numbers because it's not just about the presence of bodies, but when we're saying that there's proportions of researchers or, excuse me, proportions of administrators and people of that nature, we need to see how the personalities show up too because while there may be women in leadership roles, how often, like Rosie was saying, is it that the personalities, perhaps, might be influential in those situations? So we have to look at who's influential, whereas it might be more, the male leaders might speak up more often as that's attributes that we've considered valuable in our patriarchal society in men that we've kind of asked and taught as in socialization, women to not. So I think that we just need to be critical of those numbers and go a little bit deeper. I think that in my gut, that kind of makes sense, but I think we need the researchers to validate that. Yeah, I just, it is a comment more than a question. What I really like about this report is that it opens up new areas for researchers to look into things that might go overlooked when looking at the things that are already, you know, the areas that are already there and established. So it is just a comment. Thank you. I had a question about that slide where they cited neutrality, notability, and I think reliability is three pillars of media that were really, were seen as forces of oppression. So notability I could see is more subjective, but I'm curious about something like neutrality, or reliability, which to me in my benighted male state seems fundamental, like what are the alternatives? Are there alternatives to those principles? I'm not sure that I'd say alternatives, more so I would say that if a policy was written in 2001, 2003, four, five, six, and this is 2018, I think we would like to readdress it. I think when it was first written, it was probably written by white men living in North America or Europe. So let's get additional voices into recrafting those policies, but also others. We know that policies are not the same across all language communities, so the policy on notability on English Wikipedia is not the same as it is on Spanish, French, Hindi, or Arabic Wikipedia. And so maybe we can kinda learn from each other from the different language wikis, but for sure it is my personal opinion that we need to look at them again and readdress them. Even like I think one of the ones that I mentioned was the policy on categories. Definitely there are differences in that policy across language wikis. How English language wiki handles categories. 19th century Scottish women writers, there is no such category on let's say the Spanish wiki which does not have a category breakout of gender. While the Catalan does or doesn't. So I think we all need to put on new lenses and relook at the major policies. I think I'm running out of time. Do we have time for one more question? Okay, I think that's it then. Thank you very much, appreciate your time.