Gender, representation and online participation : a quantitative study

Online communities are flourishing as social meeting web spaces for users and peer community members. Different online communities require different levels of competence for participants to join, and scattered evidence suggests that females and minorities as participants can be under-represented. Additional anecdotal evidence suggests that women withdraw from unfriendly online communities. Owing to the limited amount of empirical evidence on the matter, this paper provides a quantitative study of the phenomenon, in order to assess the representation and social impact of gender in online communities. This study positions itself within recent and focused international initiatives, launched by the European Commission in order to encourage women in the field of science and technology. Focusing on technical support networks around web content management tools (e.g. Drupal and WordPress) and on questions & answers websites (e.g. StackOverflow), this paper unearths a spectrum of online communities, in which women participate to various degrees. Keywords: gender; computer supported collaborative work; empirical studies in collaborative and social computing; online communities