Gender inequality in contributions to Wikipedia

We explore why women do not contribute to Wikipedia as much as men do. Researchers and the Wikimedia Foundation estimate that Wikipedia editors are predominantly men. This gender gap leads to the biased coverage of women as well as topics important to women, such as women's health. In an intermediate microeconomics class at a large public university in the United States, we will randomly assign Wikipedia articles on economists' biographies or economic concepts to students who can earn bonus points by completing this assignment. Students will also complete a set of games as measurements of personal traits and a survey experiment to explore why we might observe a gender gap in contributions to economic concepts but not in biographies.

2020-11-20

2020-12-18

A binary variable, denoting whether or not the participant edits at least one of the assigned Wikipedia article.

In Fall 2020 semester, we plan to recruit participants from an Intermediate Microeconomics course, Econ 401, which has more than 400 registered students. Econ 401 is one of the two core economic theory courses at the university and is a prerequisite for a large number of upper-level electives in the Economics Department. Students enrolled in Econ 401 are usually in their sophomore or junior year, with an intention to declare a major in Economics. To incentivize student participation, the instructor introduced the experiment as a series of bonus point activities, with a cumulative weight of 1% of the total course grade.

The first bonus point activity is introduced as a battery of games and survey as "Pre-treatment measurements", where we measure the risk preference, level-k thinking, conditional and unconditional trust, and complex problem-solving skills (Knapsack game, a discrete optimization problem).

After students complete the online games and surveys, we will randomly assign them to two experimental conditions, stratified by gender and their Econ 401 exam scores. Students are randomized into receiving two Wikipedia articles on either (1) economists' biographies or (2) economics concepts which the instructor has covered in Econ 401. For each Wikipedia article, we provide an authoritative source that the student can use as a reference. Each student is assigned a unique set of Wikipedia articles.

After the main editing activities, we will circulate a debriefing survey immediately after. For each subject, we measure the absolute and relative confidence based on two incentivized survey questions. For each of the assigned Wikipedia pages, we ask students to evaluate the amount of expertise required to edit the pages and rate the overall qualification (in terms of academic standing) as needed to edit the assigned pages.


For more details, please refer to Section 2 in the Supporting Document.

We used stratified randomization based on gender and academic performance in previous midterms. Participants are partitioned into four quartiles. Random assignment is carried out within each quartile-gender group.

We assign treatment conditions at the individual level.

No

In total, there are 436 participants in the target population.

436 in Fall 2020, assuming 100% participation rate. We also have a pilot session with 403 subjects under an identical protocol back in April 2019 (Winter 2019 semester)

218 per each treatment arm, assuming we have 100% participation rate.

As stated in Section 2.4 in the Supporting Document, we need roughly 190 subjects in each experimental condition to get at 80% power with alpha = 0.05.