Google’s Knol and gender issues in social software design

Posted: August 6th, 2008 | Author: admin | Tags: , , | 1 Comment »

In her review of Google’s Knol project (sort of like Wikipedia, except each article is written by a single person, ideally an authority on the topic), danah boyd dropped a one-liner that kind of set me off:

Y’see - a system that is driven by individualism quickly becomes a tool for self-promoters. (And men…)

I commented without thinking, blasting away at what I saw as “arbitrary sexism” from a blog that’s otherwise been pretty balanced.  There have been a few replies to my initial comment that got me thinking about the issue in a bit more depth, so I wanted to go into that here.

First off, someone going by ‘b’ answered me with:

It isn’t sexism when its a legitimate problem. In 2006, nearly 80% of wikipedia authors were male. If you think that’s changed in 2 years, you might wanna rethink gender politics and who runs the web.

which is interesting, although I’m not sure I agree with it in whole.  My problem with danah’s post wasn’t that I don’t think there are more men on Wikipedia (or wherever) than women, just that making a strong association of individualism (or whatever trait) with maleness and using that to decry certain modes of social software design seemed wrongheaded to me.

Then danah replied (very graciously I might add, since my initial comment, upon re-reading, was a little flamish), with:

[...] As b notes Wikipedia is heavily driven by male participation. The problem is that individualism and single authorship rewards tend to push towards even greater inequality in terms of gender and participation. This is a problem in publishing at large. Collaborative projects tends to attract more female participation than non-collaborative ones. High visibility projects tend to attract more male participation then low visibility ones. What Knol is doing is maximizing the things that traditionally generate more male participation. Thus, it’s not surprising that even on their showcase front page that is supposed to provide a representative sample of knols, the vast majority of knols are written by men. [...]

While this does serve to contextualize her initial remark (I don’t mind it so much if I can interpret it as a broad social criticism rather than an offhand diss), I’m still a little ambivalent.  On the one hand, of course we want to encourage a more even gender balance online (for a bit of an explanation as to why, see my last comment on her post).  But on the other hand it’s somewhat inevitable that certain online spaces will appeal more to men and others more to women (it would seem ludicrous to decry a video arcade as a fundamentally flawed public space simply because it appeals more to men than to women).  Moreover, her criticism relies heavily on the strong association of individualism with males and collaboration with females, which is of course a very broad generalization.  Given her field of research, I’m sure she’s seen a lot of statistics that tend to support that polarized view of gender (in her reply to my comment she linked to an old post of hers that breaks down blogs’ linking habits based on gender, it’s an interesting read, as is Joe Clark’s rebuttal), but I don’t think those kind of generalizations are necessarily very helpful for those building tools like Wikipedia or Knol.

The key here is her repeated use of “tends to”.  These are trends.  Let me put it this way: if you had statistics that showed that more women commented on blogs where the comment box was blue and more men commented on blogs where the comment box was grey, and you also knew that there was already a skew towards male participation, would it be your moral obligation to make the box on your blog blue to try to “even things out”?  That’s a trivial example, because the color of the comment box has no other impact outside of simple aesthetics.  Knol is something else entirely, because it’s trying a different mode of online authorship.  What if it works well for certain topics?  I generally trust information on Wikipedia, but maybe some people don’t, and it’s impossible to use for citations or research since the authorship is unknown.  Knol tries to fix that issue by making the articles peer-reviewed and single-author.  Of course it will never be as exhaustive or as intricate as Wikipedia, but maybe it will serve some purpose.  If even one person finds useful information on Knol that helps them in some way, it seems completely wrongheaded to attack it because it’s designed in such a way that “tends to” attract more male writers than female.

But no matter what I think about her criticism of Knol, her replies to my comments have definitely got me thinking about the role of gender in social software deisgn, which is something I’d never really considered before.  For that, and for her patience in replying exhaustively to a two-line flame, I’d like to thank her.  Check out her blog at zephoria.org/thoughts.