More Men Than Women Share Creative Work Online
Professor Eszter Hargittai and PhD student Gina Walejko of Northwestern’s Web Use Project recently published a paper asserting that men were about a third more likely than women to share their creative endeavors online. This is despite the fact that both genders produce creative work at comparable rates. Hargittai explains that “It appears that lack of perceived skill is holding women back from putting their creative content out there”. In my personal experience the difficulty of presenting one’s work in an attractive and respectable fashion is more troublesome than the fear of having the work itself criticized. Do you share your work online? If not, what’s keeping you from doing so? The full 23-page paper in PDF format the Web Use Project home page.
Productivity and quality nonprofit group APQC is running a study to and develop best practices in using social networking tools to efficiently locate and approach subject matter experts within an organization. Senior Project Manager Darcy Lemons describes the effort in her blog:
“The project team has identified several themes related to the topic. One of these themes is how expertise location and social networking are related to the larger sphere of collaboration and knowledge sharing. Namely, can expertise location and social networking tools be used to support collaboration and knowledge sharing?”
I like the idea of using web tools like Twitter (with Summize conversation searches) and Facebook to find the people at my company who might know the answers to my questions. Walking cube to cube to ask for advice and introductions has a great social value but is not always a viable option – my coworkers are busy people! In his book on knowledge sharing author Robert Buckman champions his company’s internal forums and knowledge bases as great ways to compress the time required to find and query your company’s experts anywhere in the world.
I noticed that participating in this study costs the entrant about $20,000! I’ll have to do some research of my own to figure out how they demonstrate value up front to prospective participants. UPDATE: Ms. Lemons took the time to explain how a company of the right size and interests could see a big return on this program. Here’s my writeup with a link to her response.
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