I wanted to expand on my remark in yesterday’s post about the gender ratio on #p2 staying “relatively well-balanced” with some statistics from the 24 hours ending at noon (Pacific time) today. While this is only one data point — and over a weekend, too — it’s roughly in line with the other measurements I’ve been makingover the last week.
For about 80-90% of the people participating, it’s possible to able to infer the like gender of the tweeter based on self-descriptions (“mom” or “dad” for example), visual information, name, and so on. Of course there’s room for error here,* so don’t treat this as gospel; and my apologies to anybody I inadvertently misclassified. Still, it’s enough to get some useful information.
To start with, notice that there are at least three different discussions overlapping on the #p2 channel:
– “debating with conservatives“: tweets that also include #tcot.
– “progressives on Twitter“: tweets that also include #rebelleft and/or #topprog, but not #tcot.
– “#p2-only“: tweets to #p2 that don’t include any of those other hashtags.
With that as a framework, here are the numbers:
| tweets | women | men | % women | % tweets by women |
|
| #p2-only | 30 | 6 | 7 | 46% | 60% |
| progressives on Twitter |
59 | 6 | 10 | 38% | 15% |
| debating with conservatives |
99 | 3 | 17 | 15% | 9% |
| all posts to #p2 | 188 | 13 | 28 | 32% | 19% |
The much lower rate of participation by women in the debates with conservatives isn’t surprising at all. These frequently degenerate into unpleasantness and insults; research has consistently shown that women are less likely to participate in this kind of environment.**
And sadly, the much lower percentage of tweets by women also isn’t surprising.  In most mixed-gender online forums, the loudest participants are almost invariably guys. @kurtismarsh, for example, has contributed 33 tweets himself; and another 25 tweets respond to him, meaning that he’s responsible for over 30% of the traffic on the entire #p2 channel. In situations like this, the magic search query I discussed in Dealing with trolls on Twitter can be very useful for improving gender equity.
It’s pretty clear where the challenges are going forward. Most obviously, we want to encourage more women to participate; and that means being able to articulate why it’s worth their while. And we’ll need to keep the loud voices from drowning out everybody else. In addition, we’ll need to keep the heavily-male-dominated “debating” from overwhelming the rest of the #p2 channel; @martinschechter and @txvoodoo’s A modest proposal for #bipart could help a lot here.
Of course, gender’s far from the only dimension to keep in mind: for #p2 to reach its potential, we also need to be aware of race, age, orientation, language, and much more — as well as intersectional issues. Still, you gotta start somewhere. So hopefully keeping these considerations at the front of everybody’s minds will help #p2 be a diverse and inclusive environment.
jon
* and I computed these manually, another potential source of error. If anybody has any suggestions for an automated utility that’ll help here, I’m all ears — I’d love something like “Tweetstats for hashtags”.
** see Susan Herring’s Gender and Power in Online Communications for an overview and references. if you’re a blogger (or otherwise active online) and for some reason haven’t read this yet, you should. right now. seriously.
Susan Herring | 22-Feb-09 at 6:27 pm | Permalink
These observations are very interesting! I’m not quite sure what #p2 is, but it sounds like a discussion space of some sort (a discussion forum on Twitter?). I recently wrote a paper about “conversational” uses of Twitter, which this appears to be. Unfortunately, we didn’t look at gender in the paper — someone should do a systematic study, taking gender into account. Anyway, here’s the reference, in case you’re interested:
Honeycutt, C., & Herring, S. C. (2009). Beyond microblogging: Conversation and collaboration via Twitter. Proceedings of the Forty-Second Hawai’i International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-42). Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Press. http://ella.slis.indiana.edu/~herring/honeycutt.herring.2009.pdf
jon | 04-Mar-09 at 7:32 pm | Permalink
Thanks very much (belatedly) for the response, Dr. Herring. Your recent work on Twitter is very interesting … I think Twitter’s potentially a great medium for collaboration and communication and it’s fascinating to track the innovative creation by the users of conventions and technologies in aid of it. Twitter clients, for example, are evolving to address the many of the challenges you mention in the conclusion section. It’s an exciting time!
Apologies for not giving more context on #p2. One way of looking at hashtags as interesting discussion spaces on Twitter; they have many of the characteristics of chat rooms as well as persistence, linkability, and searchability — and most important the ability to have multiple hashtags on the message, i.e., multiple semi-overlapping spaces. At the same time, hashtags can also be viewed as tribes (in Seth Godin’s sense of the word).
So #p2 (for “progressives 2.0”) is an attempt to create a space/tribe that bridges the gaps between multiple existing progressive hashtags, and also more generally between progressives and communities like feminists, women of color, LGBTQ, etc., who have been marginalized by the progressive blogosphere. Tracy Viselli and I introduced the idea in Strategies for progressives on Twitter in The Exception a few weeks ago; Sarah Granger’s #p2 Takes on the Progressive Twitter Challenge on techPresident has more. It’s early days yet, but things have been fairly encouraging so far … stay tuned for more!
jon | 09-May-09 at 12:27 pm | Permalink
#p2 recently decided to change its self-description to
. The debate here was contentious, and many people (including me) saw it as a power struggle with strong gender aspects. So I’ve been tracking gender ratios on #p2 for the last few days and figured I’d use this spot to collect various statistics and some related thoughts.
In roughly-chronological order:
– #p2 helped NWLC, AAUW and #fem2 with #fairpay. we contributed the idea of “tweeting points” and some examples. #p2 members were major contributors on Twitter and in the blogosphere (at least 6 of the 150 posts on the NWLC site, remarkably good given our size). we also documented an #diversityfail: the “big blogs” of the progressive blogosphere ignored paycheck equity. how progressive! somewhat disappointingly, however, #p2 participation in #fairpay had significant gender skew. while a few guys participated, most didn’t; and almost all of the people who invested significant time in #fairpay were women.
– roughly 40-45% of the participants at our April 30 chat were women, up from the 35% of participants in our first week. yay us! alas in the aftermath of the contentious debate about the future direction of #p2 and the @p2info account, gender equity took a hit; on May 7 and May 8, only about 30% of the participants were women. sigh. anecdotally several women have told me that they have held back from participating on #p2 because of the argumentative tone.
– roughly 25% of the tweets are by women. this is up from the 19% we measured after our first week.
– the early trend of 90%-male participation in posts about conservatives has held up. #bipart wound up going in a different direction and nothing else has emerged to fill this role so it may wind up staying on #p2. this is often a third or more of the traffic of #p2 and so it’s also likely to contribute to the argumentative tone.
– For the last week or so, every time I check 8 or 9 out of the 10 loudest tweeters are guys.* so it’s very likely that women are getting drowned out in the conversation and most of the articles being linked to on #p2 are written by guys for primarily-male audiences. i brought this up on Twitter as a #diversityfail and some interesting discussions ensued. We’re going to coordinate with #fem2 on next steps.
– More generally, it’s very likely that relatively-quiet people are getting drowned out by the loudest ones.
When I checked earlier today the 10 most verbose tweeters account for almost two-thirds of the total tweets. That’s not good. @jilevin alone is accounting for almost 20% of the traffic with automated repostings of news items.Update, May 11: wthashtag’s stats gave a misleading impression here. The 10 most verbose tweeters account for more like 20-30%; jilevin’s at about 7%.Sigh. Once again, #p2 replicates classic “gender in online communication” results. A lot of this is just growing pains as we all become more familiar with the technology and start to work out conventions. Still, it’s disappointing. Guys, please stop being like that.
The good news though is that it points to ways to make progress. Twitter search magic can potentially help here. For example, if you’re tired of talking about and arguing with consevatives, try this. Or ignoring the 8 loudest tweeters — including me 🙂 Making it easier to do stuff like this and customize it for who you do/don’t want to see could help everybody to have the #p2 experience more like what he or she prefers.
Overall, I’m encouraged. It’s reallllllllllly hard work but we expected that going in. I wish we had been able to discuss #p2’s future less contentiously but for a relatively-new group facing our first major fork in the road I thought we did fairly well. Working with #fem2 on this is exactly what Tracy and I were talking about: Twitter as a chance to engage with a community margainlized by the progressive blogosphere. We’ve got a conference call and another tweeting scheduled for next week and so it’s a great opportunity for progress. So on the whole, I’m optimistic ..
Stay tuned!
jon
* as measured by wthashtag’s imperfect-but-better-than-nothing page, and occasionally hand-counted by myself to double-check
Harry Waisbren | 09-May-09 at 2:08 pm | Permalink
Those are really great stats you put together Jon, thank you so much for staying on this case. I completely agree that #p2 must not be a place where women or any demographic group has their voices shouted over, and I am very excited to learn more from you about the history of this problem and how we can combat it!
I very strongly believe though that we should not discourage anyone from tweeting to #p2 as much as they want. Rather, I think we must recognize that the tweeting is only going to get louder as we gain more participants and as the current participants start tweeting more vociferously. I think we must recognize this as the main problem and focus on building #p2 into a place that will streamline the voices of those who far too often become marginalized and disempowered.
jon | 09-May-09 at 3:31 pm | Permalink
Really? How about an automated bot that retweets the same handful of links every hour or so. What value is that to #p2 or any of the people following it? Or imagine somebody who constantly posts unrelated updates and includes #p2 (“had lunch #p2” “drank coffee #p2”) Those are both situation where I would encourage the tweeter *not* to include #p2 on those tweets. More is not necessarily better.
It’s already loud, and it’s going to get louder. Unless, of course, the people who are loudest start ratcheting it down.
That’s one of the challenges, but far from the only one. And while I agree with the goal, it still seems that it’s going to be really hard to accomplished when the voices that are usual marginalized and disempowered are being drowned out by loud white guys. Suggestions?
jon
Harry Waisbren | 09-May-09 at 4:43 pm | Permalink
Great points Jon—I completely agree that the bots or posts about non-progressive issues (i.e. drinking coffee) are not useful at all here. I also agree that there are certainly many other problems/challenges we need to address with #p2 aside from this and I don’t mean to diminish those at all. Lastly, your point is entirely true that “it still seems that it’s going to be really hard to accomplished when the voices that are usual marginalized and disempowered are being drowned out by loud white guys.”
My suggestion for solving this is that we have to accept that this is indeed hard, but that asking the loudest voices to ratchet it down is not the answer. It may or may not work to ask, but I can’t imagine a sustainable solution involving asking a straight white guy like myself to participate less. As a straight white guy who cares extremely deeply about diversity and empowerment, I want to help as much as I possibly can.
However, clearly while trying to help I do not want to drown out other voices while doing so. Yet I don’t want the creation of this environment to come at the expense of my capacity to participate in the conversation either. Rather, I want a forum where I can engage in such conversation with the diverse communities I can not engage anywhere else. I’m specifically looking for the opinions of those sexually and ethnically diverse, but I also want to be able to have a conversation with them as opposed to just listening.
The reason why I think this problem is a subset of a larger issue is that I see #p2’s size dramatically increasing in time. When that happens, even if it is 100% non-white guys voices will still be drowned out amidst the constant flurry of tweets. To solve this, I think we need to view #p2 as a place to help those who are disempowered to gain empowerment by directing them to the proper mediums that can amplify the conversations they want and need to have. It isn’t possible for all of this conversation to occur on the #p2 hashtag alone, and I’m specifically looking to JTI as a model and example for the necessary scope for the sort of virtual community necessary for this project.
Of course I have such an incredible amount of respect for you and this project that if you think me tweeting less to #p2 will help I will do that. However, I’ll repeat that I don’t think this is a sustainable solution, if only for those less knowledgable about the mission of #p2 or less caring about its prerogatives (i.e. shoq and his p2info bot) not abiding by such a request.
jon | 10-May-09 at 1:25 pm | Permalink
Harry,
First of all, I don’t consider you one of the loudest voces — you’ve made about 75 tweets in the last week. There are at least fifteen guys who have tweeted more than you.
On the other hand, You’ve tweeted more than myrnatheminx, AriMelber, baratunde, GloPan, AntoniaZ, jillmz, seasonothebitch, and dmf71 combined. And you’ve tweeted more than all but three women (Cody_K, Karoli, and cyn3matic).
If it were just you doing this, it wouldn’t be a big deal. But the same’s true of all fifteen guys who have tweeted more than you — including me. Quieter voices are gettning drowned out; it disproportionately affects women.
Why not? It seems perfectly logical to me, and I don’t see any way to address the imbalance without this happening.
You’ve probably never experienced it before. My experience and the literature all say this is typically necessary for a sustainable solution. So, be imaginative!
We’ll need to learn new techniques for participating in the conversation — listening more, waiting a while to respond, being more selective about what you retweet, etc. It’s a new medium so we’re all working things out.
There are certainly are challenges and open questions about how to get a sustainable solution. In any case, getting the people who do know and care about #p2 and its mission focused on addressing the problem’s an necessary first step.
And remember that Twitter-based technology is evolving very quickly, and simple things can make a big difference here. So let’s not give up on this possibility without having tried it.
jon
Harry Waisbren | 10-May-09 at 3:13 pm | Permalink
This is an important conversation we are having, and here are my thoughts to your response:
1. Quieter voices are definitely getting drowned out, but this is going to happen if straight men tweet less anyways. If #p2 includes only minorities yet is so saturated that an individuals’ tweets are shifted off the page too quickly to begin a conversation we still have a major issue.
This problem is only getting bigger as #p2 grows, and even if asking people like myself to tweet less is a short term solution to gain a more diverse membership it will not solve the larger problem of a lack of conversation. Even if we build a proportionally diverse community we still must EMPOWER that community, and I am laser focused on ensuring that occurs!
2. Asking the louder voices to ratchet it down is only a short term solution as even if that happens we still must have the other diversified members join the community. This is why my focus is on empowerment, as even if we get a more diversified base to tweet we still must create the system to amplify their voices! It is absolutely necessary to do this if we are to make it worth their while not only to tweet to #p2 but to take part in coordinated campaigns both online and on the ground.
This is why I quibble with your assertion that I am not being imaginative—I am thinking much bigger than how twitter hash tags have operated thus far, as I think we need to harness the power of various mediums alongside on the ground activism for coordinated national campaigns if we plan on being the “progressive batchannel” in actuality!
3. Jon—if you think a young person like myself has not been told to just “listen” then you clearly do not know as much about being a young person in America these days than I thought you did 🙂
We young people have been told we are nothing but dirty hippies and that we must listen to our wise elders our entire lives. Older generations have screwed things up so horribly though that I must watch my friends drop out of school because they can’t afford it. I am also personally dealing with one of the absolutely worst job markets for recent graduates that our country has seen.
The “progressive generation” is experiencing the “fierce urgency of NOW”, and we will NOT simply wait as our prerogatives continue to be ignored OVER and OVER and OVER. Of course I know you did not mean to be insulting Jon, but I hope you understand why I so vociferously take issue with the characterization your provided of my demographic.
4. You are completely right that “We’ll need to learn new techniques for participating in the conversation — listening more, waiting a while to respond, being more selective about what you retweet, etc. It’s a new medium so we’re all working things out.” I don’t mean to diminish this difficulty, and it’s why I completely understand how you are viewing the current problem.
However, you also right that “Twitter-based technology is evolving very quickly, and simple things can make a big difference here.” This is entirely right, but I think where we disagree is the degree of imagination we must utilize to solve our current conundrum.
The crux of my view on this problem is that we must think much bigger than any hash tag or twitter effort that has come before us. We must be the innovators here, as simply having even the best hash tag on Twitter is not NEARLY enough.
Twitter will be evolving even more rapidly, and I am completely committed to doing anything I can to ensure that #p2 is a primary leader in the innovations that take place towards ensuring groups like ours have the optimum amount of success! This will require new tactics though, and I think viewing #p2 through a narrow lens where we work to coordinate tweets from a proportionally diverse crowd is just not going to get the job done.
jon | 11-May-09 at 9:11 am | Permalink
Harry,
First of all apologies that my tone came across as disrespectful. It really wasn’t meant that way. The “we” in “we need to learn techniques including listen more …” wasn’t a comment directed at youth; it was a comment directed at loud tweeters, including myself. Believe me, it’s much harder to learn these new techniques after decades of online participation in “loudest-winds” environments like Usenet, email, and the blogosphere! Still I can see that it looks like I’m saying “kid, shut up and listen” … sorry about that.
Summing up where we are, I think we agree that #p2s should prioritize diversity and empowerment both because it’s part of our mission — and because inclusive groups, with equitable and diverse participation, function far better. The more diverse we are, the better we’ll be as a “progressive batchannel” and umbrella tag for progressives.
It seems to me that our disagreement is about the strategy for getting there. Let me take a stab at summarizing it, framing it in terms of the intersection of two dimensions of marginalization: loudness and gender. Right now, there’s evidence that
– the loudest tweeters are marginalizing quiet voices
– guys are tweeting more than twice as much as women, and not in general tweeting about “women’s issues”, so women are getting marginalized in several ways: participating less in the conversation, and having less attention paid to issues like #fairpay
I’m advocating behavior change by loud guys. You (and others) have pointed out that many loud guys who don’t care enough about gender equity to change their behavior away, and what I’m advocating will drive them away #p2 and slow our growth. I agree.
Where we differ is that I see this as a good thing.
How’s that as a summary?
jon
Harry Waisbren | 11-May-09 at 9:51 am | Permalink
First off, I presumed you meant no offense such as “kid shut up”. I give you way more credit than that 🙂
Rather, I think you hit the nail on the head in terms of our differing views on the strategy of getting to the place where we all want to go. Yet your description of a youth such as myself listening more and participating less is a useful example of why we have differing views on the degree of utility for advocating behavior change by loud guys.
The problem I see with driving away loud guys is not only because it sends a negative message to those who very well might share our priorities (especially if it is directed advertantly or inadvertantly to those in demograhics–such as youth or members of the working class–who feel as if their diversified constituency deserve a louder voice too). The bigger problem which this is a subset of is that as our ranks increase, even if it is a completely proportionally diversified crowd, the necessary conversation to foster action will still be too difficult as tweets fall off the page quicker and quicker.
Where we differ is that I think we must embrace the concept that #p2 will always be a constant flurry of tweets which we will have a limited capacity to control. What we can control, though, is the tools we put in place to foster conversation and the mediums through which we direct these conversations into action.
I am not patently against efforts to quiet louder voices and will bow to your experience and research in regards to creating a more diversified foundation for #p2 to grow. A word of warning though—especially if we want to focus on EFCA—alienating members of the working class could be a VERY big problem, and we must make sure that #p2 remains a welcoming environment to all constituencies even as we try to create a more diversified foundation.
To sum up my argument: Even if we follow through on your strategy, I think we need to focus on the real problem, which is that there are so many diversified groups seeking empowerment that it is going to be exceedingly difficult for us to put any parameters in place to limit one groups’ (even straight white guys’) participation.
Instead, I think we must focus our energies in a more positive direction by creating tools that can amplify the voices of the groups’ who are most marginalized–especially within #p2 itself–so that conversation can more easily be achieved on the topics most important to them. Furthermore, I think this focus must also include strategies for the community to come together on action items (either online or on the ground), as we will never have the diversified community we desire if we do not provide tangible day-to-day actions that lead to their empowerment.
Harry Waisbren | 10-May-09 at 3:45 pm | Permalink
Here is an alternative suggestion for a short term solution (which could also be used in conjunction with getting louder voices to tweet less):
What if we utilize @p2pt0 to specifically retweet the best tweets with a focus on ensuring diversified voices are more proportionally represented? Furthermore, we can use @p2pt0 to try to jumpstart conversations and ensure that such tweets and such diverse voices do not get lost amidst the constant flurry of new tweets.
We can have a page on the wiki specifically citing the demographics information you are recording to explain the voices we choose to amplify. This will further act as more encouragement for these people to take part in #p2 and hopefully will help convince them about the degree to which we are motivated to work for their empowerment!
jon | 11-May-09 at 9:14 am | Permalink
It would be great to have a Twitter accounts that do this — not sure if it should be @p2pt0 or a different one.
Could you set up a page on the wiki to start the planning for this? A couple of questions to cover: how do we decide on what the desired mix of retweets are; who decides what to retweet from this account; what are the mechanics of retweeting (probably, shared password) … etc.; how can #p2 members give feedback on the choice of retweets.
Depending on what state this is in, we can spend a few minutes on this in either Tuesday’s phone call or Thursday’s tweeting …
jon
Harry Waisbren | 11-May-09 at 9:56 am | Permalink
Good call on on the wiki page Jon—I have a few other things I need to do this afternoon (incredible happenings as a matter of fact that we’ll no doubt talk more about later), but will give it some more thought and get it up ASAP 🙂
jon | 23-May-09 at 11:08 am | Permalink
#p2’s May 14 chat once again had balanced participation; in fact over 50% of the participants were women, and over 50% of the tweets came from women. We spent about 25 minutes of the chat discussing sexism on #p2 — see the log for more. There’s additional discussion on the wiki.
On Twitter, the “top contributors” from Wthashtag’s stats are 80%+ male: mikearama, jilevin, Shoq, Cody_K, ericgrant, fleckman, TweeterPoll, FinanceBuzz, Mickey_X, Gr8RDH. This list includes two conservative trolls (fleckman and FinanceBuzz), and an automated spammer (TweeterPoll).
Meanwhile on the wiki:
– of the 82 members, 40-45% are women
– of the 36 participants (at least one thread or multiple page edits), 35-40% are women
– the top 6 participants in the discussion forum are guys: me, Shoq, Harry, ryking, bphoon, xaipe.
It seems to me that combining this with other measurements (in an earlier comment, in the original post, and on the wiki), there’s a consistent picture emerging:
* the #p2 community is roughlty 40-45% women
* chat (in Twitter and elsewhere) is the only communications mechanism we’ve used that gives women equal voice
* on Twitter and the discussion forum, giving people a way of filtering out the loudest voices would not only make it easier for the vast majority of participants to have their voice heard, it would result in a better gender balance.
jon
Updated, May 25: I added references to the discussion in the May 14 chat and the follow-up conversation on the wiki, which should have been here all along
Jake Aryeh Marcus | 23-May-09 at 4:47 pm | Permalink
I think there is a step or two in an attempt to diversify that we should do before we go to suggesting filtering as a remedy to the lack of stream diversity. We need to have a discussion – in one of the balanced environments, like a Chatterous Tweetchat (we need more than 140 characters) – concerning dominating conversations and leaving the hash off when appropriate. Filtering is something everyone needs to understand how to do but ultimately will not build a diverse environment. Filtering is last ditch.
You may be suggesting a different filtering mechanism than I know, though. Then you need to let me know what you mean. 🙂 I filter out all posts with “tcot.” I don’t think I miss anything I want to read by doing that and am not excluded from any discussion I would want to be in. I might consider filtering out all posts by or with X (where X represents one of the highest volume Tweeters). However, if #p2 conversation is dominated by Tweeter X, I am excluding myself from #p2 discussion and neither making the stream more manageable nor creating an opportunity to become part of the conversation. The Tweets of X define #p2.
jon | 25-May-09 at 10:59 am | Permalink
Agreed that we should continue have discussions about avoiding domination … however I see these as complementary to filtering. Some of the loudest voices explicitly don’t buy into #p2’s diversity goals, and so they’re not likely to change their behavior.
We may well mean somewhat different things by filtering. I think of it as a more nuanced hashtag equivalent of “unfollow”: tweets I don’t want to see in a stream. A big difference from unfollowing though is that I can look at the same stream through multiple filters.
So the way I look at it, filtering can be a technique for achieving diversity. Different people have different preferences for what kind of information they want to see from #p2; easy-to-use filters supporting different views let everybody choose for themselves — and toggle between them, seeing a variety of perspectives. The differences between the “raw” #p2 search, the way things look when ignoring the loudest posters and a few conservative trolls, and feminist and women of color crossposts on #p2.
#p2’s not monolithic. it’s used for multiple purposes, and there are a lot of different conversations happening simultaneously. Despite its limitations, Twitter search lets you separate out different ones … for example, – discussion-only (no links), back-and-forth with conservatives (cross-posts to #tcot), and for progressives that aren’t about conservatives.
And #p2 takes place in a broader context as well, so you can combine it with other hashtags … for example, here’s a progressives + diversity news feed that also includes #rebelleft, #topprog, #fem2, #woc, and #lgbt.
Viewing the multiple conservations on #p2 in different ways doesn’t mean you’re excluding yourself — except from the ones you don’t want to take part in. For example, unless I’m up for debating conservatives, I don’t include #tcot on my posts. Similarly when somebody’s making sexist comments or trolling, I’d just as soon not be part of that conservation.
True, others may choose to filter you out, which makes it harder to have a conversation with them — I’m painfully aware that any kind of “loudest tweeters” filter would be likely to include me. That’s their choice, though, just like choosing to unfollow or block me.
So, back to your initial point: I agree that we need to have discussions (in chat and on Twitter) on domination behavior as well as sexist speech and other diversity-related issues. I see the filtering as complementary, and so worth discussing and experimenting with in parallel.
jon
Mikal | 23-May-09 at 11:42 am | Permalink
Very interesting statistics.
I’d add nuances to the emerging picture.
1. Today its roughly 40-45% women, you probably want to grow this number.
2. One of the findings is that it IS possible to create an environment where there is balanced gender participation
3. Chat in twitter is the only communication mechanism where women have had PROVEN equal voice (distinguishing proven and unproven is important – because it may not be the tools themselves [unless you have other research])
4. I don’t see where the twitter and discussion point filtering out the loudest voices has been proven, or even hinted at. For example, who says that people would use the filters? Or maybe the loudest voices are looked to as thought leaders so their involvement shifts others to observers rather than participants (a role they maybe subconsciously comfortable in playing). Kind of like the different behaviors that take place in a classroom where the proclaimed ‘smartest kids’ aren’t in a room but a problem must still be solved.
And lastly – jon you’ve probably read more studies related to gender and minority participation than anyone I know. I’d love to read a white paper by you talking about what they all say and they key ingredients necessary for healthy participation. It would also let me know what studies I need to be aware of and refer to as I lobby for balanced participation on projects I work on.
jon | 23-May-09 at 12:44 pm | Permalink
Thanks for the reply, Mikal. Agreed on #1 and #2. For #3, I’m not claiming anything is proven or unproven; my point is that the pattern so far is that women have a roughly-equal voice in chat and not on the Twitter hashtag or the wiki’s discussion forum.
On #4, the statistics so far show consistent gender-balance benefits from filtering out the loudest voices, so while I agree it hasn’t been “proven” it’s much more than hinted at. On the wiki,
all posts: 80% male
posts by top 6: 100% male
posts filtering out top 6: 50% female
The numbers on twitter aren’t quite as dramatic, but filtering out the tweets involving the loudest weeters would would increases the percentage of tweets by women by about 3-7%.
Point taken that filtering techniques are only valuable if people use them; there are a lot of usability issues here. Still, seems like a worthwhile goal.
And good suggestion on the white paper, I’ll try to find the time to do this!
jon
Myrna the Minx | 24-May-09 at 2:00 pm | Permalink
Well if we all added #p2 to every thing we tweeted and retweeted each of those tweets, we might be up in the stats too. However, most of us are selective about what we tweet with #p2. I would also note that most people cannot tweet all day because other requirements in their lives. As a result, there is no way to compete with people who abuse the tag and are able to tweet 14 hours per day. That will always be a problem.
jon | 25-May-09 at 11:22 am | Permalink
Agreed, there are a lot of factors contributing here. jilevin uses an auto-retweeter; Shoq makes a lot of tweets people consider off-topic; a lot of the top 10 tweeters enjoy debating or poking the other side. couple that with different amounts of time availability and it’s not surprising that there’ such asymmetry.
There are also some differences in underlying philosophy. Some people think “more is better”; others don’t think broad or equitable participation matters. Sometimes people change their behavior as they better understand the consequences; sometimes peer pressure helps; some people — trolls, spammers, etc. — won’t change.
There’s nothing unique to Twitter in these patterns, which occurs regularly in online communications. Elsewhere, the best response is a combination of community norms and some kind of moderation — by administrators and/or by the community (a la Slashdot). Moderation isn’t an option here because of the open nature of Twitter hashtags, but if we can solve the usability challenges filtering could potentially fill the same role.
jon
Jake Aryeh Marcus | 25-May-09 at 12:50 pm | Permalink
Completely agree that filtering is complementary to discussions about #p2 user consensus about appropriate use of the tag. If, perhaps ultimately on the wiki, we have thoughts/boundaries/agreement to which we can direct #p2 users, we can more clearly (perhaps only as individuals) decide who is deliberately using the tag in a way that is not related in any way to diversity. With the exception of all things tcot and one “top” #p2 Tweeter, I am not yet filtering my #p2 Tweetdeck column. If a Tweeter has made explicit that he or she will abuse the tag (by auto-retweeting, trolling, or deliberately ignoring diversity), I want to know that and I will filter that person out of my feed.
Finally, Mikal’s point number 4 above is basically what I was trying to say about the Tweets of X defining #p2. At some point, finding the #p2 posts which represent diversity (of Tweeter or content) will no longer be worth the work involved. If all the Tweets I would wish to read are already at #fem2, #woc, or #lgbt, making my way through #p2 won’t serve any purpose.
Hope that makes sense. 🙂
Is it possible to use the “block” Twitter function against people who are not following you? I thought I could only effectively accomplish this by creating my search in a way that excludes their posts (also somewhat difficult to do with the glitchy nature of both Tweetdeck and Twitter search function).
DinkyShop | 28-May-09 at 1:29 pm | Permalink
I have (perhaps) a silly question… how do u know who is male vs female?
I mean, I will self identify when asked, but I have two Twitter profiles which are gender neutral (by design). However, I use #p2 from both profiles w/ a modicum of regularity. I, Dinkyshop, am female.
However, because I get more crap from male trolls (vs female trolls), I have purposely picked SNs which do not overtly indicate my gender (bc over the years, again, I have noticed men are more likely to attack women posters for a variety of reasons already stated in this thread.)
I HAVE noticed that my Twitter profile which seems to imply i am male, does attract more #tcot asshats and sexists, but then, that profile also posts slightly more provocative things (by design.) So…
The likihood of male trolls vs female trolls has been historically true –going back to listserve and other such online discussion/activist communities (back in the mid 1990s..) I suspect my other Twitter profile may lead people to think I am male, when obviously I am not. But I use different profiles for different demographics (for other reasons, because of the different demographics I am trying to reach.) I also use the other (2nd) profile to say things so as not to drive away parts of certain demographics I’ve cultivated in profile #1, lol.
Or maybe I just forget that you guys (gender neutral) are very clever, and remember from a singular post, that both of my profiles have a woman behind them. As all of you have noted, the issue is not limited to the Twitter community– nor #p2s in general..
jon | 30-Aug-09 at 12:25 pm | Permalink
Apologies for the belated response, both to Dinkyshop and to @mzmartipants, who asked me a similar question during the #fem2 chat. It’s a great question … and the answer is very messy.
First of all I want to emphasize that these numbers are very rough: there’s plenty of room for inaccuracy. Also the model is very simplified — for example it ignores situations with one person having multiple profiles. Also, by focusing on ‘male’ and ‘female’, it marginalizes trans and queer and other genders. And its in terms of Twitter profile’s performed gender, which may be different than the underlying people’s identifications. Even with all these imperfections I think the analysis is still very useful, but don’t take things here as gospel.
With that said, the things I look at:
In your case, I counted you as “unknown” until I saw you self-describe as female in a comment somewhere (can’t remember where, sorry). I’m not sure what your other profile is and so am not sure how I’d classify it.
Hope this helps! As I say, it’s very messy answer. Please highlight any problems, and also suggest ways to improve!
jon
dinkyShop | 30-Aug-09 at 8:57 pm | Permalink
Ok, those stats are interesting..
although I will add, I have a blog (dif SN), that covers planning, environmental racism, public planning policy that discriminates, housing & design issues that are affected by race, class (maybe gender). However, said “topics” are not traditionally perceived as a “progressive” blog material. But it is progressive, in my opinion. I don’t write about traditional politics– but do write about how politics (policy) affects communities, affects commerce, capital, development patterns etc (which is, actually political ..) But we architect/planners aren’t seen (counted) as #p2 bloggers, imo.
It’s been my assertion for decades (I’m certainly not alone nor was I first in this assessment) that affordable housing, a living wage, healthcare and fair/equitable education are the biggest challenges facing the USA.. not the so-called “terrorists” that pre-occupy war criminal Cheney. Policies that create American apartheid, create permanent underclass, kill off groups via environmental racism, promote/create institutional segregation etc., are the new genocide/apartheid for the 21st century. Progressive causes and topics include much more than politics, the environment, labor. (I know you p2s understand this, yet many bloggers conveniently omit these aforementioned policy issues from the analysis and discussion.)
Anyway, because these are themes covered under “planning, architecture, community, & design and not under “politics” topic heading, I guess blogs like mine are igged by progressives. Just making an observation.. (not accusing anyone here…)
jon | 02-Sep-09 at 11:06 am | Permalink
Agreed: the definition of what constitutes the “progressive blogopshere” is highly arbitrary, and people who limit their scope to the political blogs miss a lot of the interesting stuff. One of the things I find encouraging about #p2 is that at least some of the usually-excluded topics get attention. Although there’s still plenty of room for progress!
jon
jon | 30-Aug-09 at 12:31 pm | Permalink
The new TweetProgress site, described in Tracy Viselli’s TweetProgress: Join The Directory of Progressives on Twitter, is another good opportunity for measurement.
TweetProgress is up to 3244 members as I write this, and from sampling the Random Member page a few times, and it seems like roughly 40% of the people there are women. This is consistent with earlier #p2 statistics of 40-45%, women, and significantly lower than the numbers for Twitter as a whole (where the overall population has been reported as high as 55% women).
The top 30 on the most followers page is similarly 40% women. This is very different from the norm on Twitter, where “most followers” lists are almost always 75%+ male*; and it also contrasts vividly with the “progressive blogosphere”, where lists of most-influential blogs and bloggers are typically overwhelmingly male. It’s especially striking when combined with the previous numbers: while progressive women are underrepresented in #p2/TweetProgress, they’re not as badly marginalized in the power structure as women are in the “progressive blogosphere”. It’s also a good contrast with #tcot (Top Conservatives on Twitter), whose “most followers” and “most interesting” lists are only 20% women, and with WeFollow’s politics list, where there’s only one woman in the top 30.**
One likely contributor for this is feminist and womanist progressives’ work on Twitter. Many of the key players in #fem2, #women2follow, #diversityfail, and Social Media Women of Color are progressives. #p2’s explicit diversity focus may also have had an impact here. No doubt there are other factors as well. No idea how to pull them all apart.
At any rate it’s fascinating data, and yet another confirmation of the theory Tracy and I espoused back in February that Twitter is an opportunity to engage with communities marginalized by the progressive blogosphere.
Props to Tracy, Jim Gilliam (of act.ly fame), and Gina Cooper for getting TweetProgress up and going. And thanks for the data!
jon
* update on September 3: actually, I went back and rechecked the numbers, and several “top users” lists like Twitterholic and “Top Follow Friday” are now up to 40% female. So it’s possible that the #p2/TweetProgress numbers don’t differ as much from the overall Twitterverse as I had thought.
** @nansen, who’s also on the #tcot list
Harry Waisbren | 30-Aug-09 at 7:38 pm | Permalink
The data and analysis of diversity from http://tweetprogress.us is definitely interesting. It’s great news that women are not underrepresented in the power structure, but then again we specifically worked to establish the effort on principles that would lead us in that direction (and fought some battles to ensure it).
I agree that there are many factors that have lead to this that might be difficult to pull apart and assess individually. I’m not very concerned with that though, rather, I’m interested in how we can utilize a powerful tool like the Tweet Progress directory to further such goals. Tweet Progress is clearly just getting off the ground, but I see some incredible potential and am looking forward to begin deciphering how we can best use it!
uggs | 24-Nov-10 at 8:41 pm | Permalink
a good blog article ,We stock Argyle, Bailey, Cardy, Sheepskin, … GHD.