In case you didn’t think this was a totally serious situation the last time the New York Times headlined it, here’s Heather Mac Donald to alert you to the real significance of the crisis:
New York Times executive editor Bill Keller announced last week at the National Press Club that news from Egypt was crowding from his paper’s front page anything that didn’t have an urgent claim on readers’ attention. So what made the cut that day, in addition to the dispatches from Cairo and Jerusalem? An article on gender imbalance among Wikipedia contributors. Barely 13 percent of the anonymous, volunteer contributors to the free online encyclopedia are female, according to a study by the Wikimedia Foundation.
The gender imbalance among Wikipedia contributors is not even news. The Wikimedia study came out in August 2009 and was covered by the Wall Street Journal at that time. In the 17 months (which the Times rounds down to “about a year”) that this report has been searing the Times‘ consciousness, the paper has come up with exactly zero new facts to explain the contributor imbalance. Instead, the paper recycles Women’s Studies bromides about a female-hostile society, providing a striking display of contemporary feminism’s intellectual decadence.
So the New York Times thinks this problem is of such seriousness that it could compete with the drama of the Egyptian non-violent revolution on the front pages. It must be pretty dramatic then:
The Times‘ next move reveals the shameless legerdemain with which contemporary feminists and their allies preserve the conceit of a sexist society. Rather than using barrier-free Wikipedia as the benchmark for measuring discrimination in the by-invitation-only world, the Times uses the invitation-only-world as the benchmark for Wikipedia. Since we already know that the low female participation rate in gatekeepered forums is the result of bias, the low female participation rate in Wikipedia must also be the result of bias. Nowhere does the article contemplate the possibility that Wikipedia may instead reveal different innate predilections for what the Times condescendingly calls “an obsessive fact-loving realm.”
Given the challenge of identifying barriers to women in a forum open to all, it is no surprise that the people quoted in the article speak in gibberish. The Times introduces the first of its experts thus:
Wikipedia shares many characteristics with the hard-driving hacker crowd, says Joseph Reagle, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard. This includes an ideology that resists any efforts to impose rules or even goals like diversity, as well as a culture that may discourage women.
No examples of such “discouragement” are provided, so let us move on to Reagle’s first quote: “It is ironic,” he tells the Times, “because I like these things — freedom, openness, egalitarian ideas — but I think to some extent they are compounding and hiding problems you might find in the real world.” This statement is nonsensical: How do “freedom, openness, and egalitarian ideas” both “compound and hide problems”? Does it now turn out that freedom and openness stand as barriers to the feminists’ sought-after equality of results between women and men?
