Learning and Evaluation/Inspire Campaign reports/Gender gap

Inspire campaign for gender diversity

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Background

What's next

Participation

Content

Developing leaders

This report focuses on the 12 Gender Gap Inspire grants that were complete as of August 2016, and the outcomes of those grants. We hope that by reading through following sections on Participation, Content and Developing leaders your understanding of the gender gap, and how it can be addressed, will expand and improve.

Introduction

The Wikimedia Foundation funds individuals and organizations to pursue ideas, programs and activities that will further the Wikimedia vision and mission through grant programs run by Community Resources. When our team began this campaign to increase the gender diversity of Wikimedia, we had three goals:

1. To experiment with proactive grantmaking and test whether we could leverage monetary and non-monetary resources to make progress on a sensitive and complex topic, such as gender diversity
2. To improve and expand individual and collective understanding of the gender gap
3. To “proactively source and support new projects aimed at increasing gender diversity [on] Wikimedia projects”. Though gender diversity in its broadest sense was the overarching goal of this campaign, we focused uniquely on increasing participation by and content about women. We chose this emphasis because the available research was clearest in indicating significant underrepresentation of women in Wikimedia projects.

This report focuses on the 12 Gender Gap Inspire grants that were complete as of August 2016, and the outcomes of those grants. We hope that by reading through following sections on Participation, Content and Developing leaders your understanding of the gender gap, and how it can be addressed, will expand and improve.

This report also reflects on our successes, challenges and learning around proactive grantmaking. You can find more information the What’s next tab, and more context in the Background tab.

Outcomes of the Gender Gap Inspire grants

In the 1.5 years since the Gender Gap Inspire Campaign began, we have seen people address the gender gap in new and interesting ways, ranging from technical to philosophical. The 11 Gender Gap Inspire grants complete to date have broadened our understanding of what it means to work on the gender gap.

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  Participation
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  Content
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  Developing leaders

What's next for our work on the gender gap?

Community Resources identified three objectives to measure progress against our goal to “proactively source and support new projects aimed at increasing gender diversity [on] Wikimedia projects”.

Read about how we did against those objectives, what we've learned from our first experiment with proactive grantmaking and how we will continue to work on the gender gap in the "What's next?" section.

Notes & References