Same Gap, Different Experiences: An Exploration of the Similarities and Differences Between the Gender Gap in the Indian Wikipedia Editor Community and the Gap in the General Editor Community

Wikipedia's contributor population contains a significant gender gap: only about 8.5% of Wikipedia's editors identify as female. However, according to the same editor survey, India's Wikipedian community is only 3% female, and there have been no scholarly attempts to investigate why the participation of female-identified individuals in India is markedly lower than that of the Wikipedian population on average. This paper presents the findings of a short qualitative case study on the experiences of current and past female-identified Indian editors of Wikipedia. In comparing their experiences with the challenges that prior research has identified for non-Indian female-identified editors, this paper argues that female-identified Indian editors are likely to face a very different set of potential barriers to their ability to fully participate in the editing of Wikipedia. As this study represents the first scholarly attempt to explore the nature of the gender gap in a specific sub-population of Wikipedia editors, multiple future research avenues have been identified