There are two things here and both have my mind spinning
- Collecting demographic information on members
- Finding ways for communities to be aware of potential bias in content / membership that is either endemic in the population or occurring online … and giving managers the tools to counter it
On the first point I have had a dream for a while which probably deserves a separate thread, but where admins could ask a series of questions (either all together or as a series) to collect preferences and provide data that can be made public or used to create groups. I will expand on this elsewhere, but it seems that completing occasional 1 or 2 question surveys could help to build up useful profiles, … and gender (in all its beautiful, myriad expressions) could be one of them.
On the second, we can only be aware of bias (in our content, culture, participation) if we can measure it. In my Discourse community, we deal with this by tracking gender using an excel calculator sheet, but I am also exploring the option to tag members in Community Analytics. We split our analysis of engagement by gender and can see issues with participation levels as well as engagement.
This in turn leads us to try and create attractive content for this audience, but I’ve struggled to keep it on-track because the nature of the bias is not that male members are not interested, but that they see the topic in a certain way (which I believe is different from the female audience). I’ve tried limiting their participation by excluding the most active male participants from early-stage discussions, but that is not easy to achieve with the discourse security functions (see my conversation on exclusions rather than inclusion).
We have also created a ‘mentor’ concept where we on-board female members in a slightly different way and encourage existing female participants to interact with them and mentor and support them, but this is in its early stages.
Interestingly I am thinking of moving away from real names because I am finding that female members (and some ethnic minority members) are less willing to be identified as such, and therefore by trying to protect them we are actually making them a more obvious target. This doesn’t help or make sense. Thankfully, we have not had any issues yet (and I don’t really expect them), and I want to keep it that way!