glass_ceiling
“Wikipedia will only contain ‘the sum of all human knowledge’ if its editors are as diverse as the population itself: you can help make that happen.”--Sue Gardner, Wikimedia FoundationWikipedians or editors are the volunteers who write and edit Wikipedia's articles. Anyone, including you, can become a Wikipedian by making changes when you find that something can be improved.It is not easy to find reliable statistics on women's place in architecture across the world. Much of the information is dated and some is based on surveys inviting responses but with no guarantee of comprehensive coverage. In 2012 it was estimated that while about 40% of architecture graduates in the western world were women, only about 12% were estimated to be practicing as licensed or registered architects.The 2013 study The Wikipedia Gender Gap Revisited measured gender bias in survey completion and estimated that as of 2008, 84% of English Wikipedia editors were male (75% of whom are under the age of 30), which indicated that fewer than 16% of contributors to Wikipedia are women.“…while histories of women are now increasingly available, they have yet to become readily visible. They rarely appear in course syllabi; indeed, it is still common in architecture schools for students to complete an entire degree without ever having heard the names of women who practiced before 1970.”--Despina Stratigakos, ‘Unforgetting Women Architects’AWA+D’s mission to “cultivate awareness of the value and advancements created by our profession” is clearly aligned with the #wikiD advocacy project. By adding articles about notable women in architecture and design to Wikipedia, we not only cultivate that awareness, but seal it in the collective perception and memory of the world. We cannot afford to be underrepresented on Wikipedia (the largest and most popular general reference work on the internet, ranked among the10 most popular websites, receiving over 8 billion pageviews per month). #WikiD edit-a-thons are a stealth, effective instrument to easily and accurately recover and record our authority and legitimacy as vital contributors to the built environment. The small steps of writing articles into Wikipedia at a grassroots level yields tantamount proceeds, especially in this time of big data collection and curation. Let’s correct history and get some eyeballs on the true picture!”There is also something very satisfying about writing a forgotten figure — a professional ancestor, maybe even a pioneer — into history.”-- Despina Stratigakos, ‘Unforgetting Women Architects’We look forward to seeing you 1:00 PM Saturday October 22nd at Woodbury University’s Library!