Wikipedia: Gender Gap
Wikipedia and the Digital Ceiling
Sexism can be Amplified Online, Generation after Generation
Just over a week ago, I published a piece about how women are rendered invisible by Wikipedia’s structural biases. To make a long story short, women’s biographies aren’t linked as frequently as men’s are. For example, David Palfrey, who’s working toward citation justice on Wikipedia, recently found that women account for only 7 percent of the links to humans on Wikipedia’s 100 Level 2 Vital articles (on topics such as Anatomy, Astronomy, Business, Climate, and Disease). Until a few days ago, the Technology page did not link to a single woman, Palfrey notes.
Some argue that Wikipedia is simply reflecting historical biases and that the absence of women is explained by systemic barriers that have forced women from the public square for generations. This exclusion does play a role, and we can look at it more closely using PAC2’s new tool, which filters linked biographies by birth date.
For example, the Physics page (one of Google’s top results for the term) currently links to 99 people (with the share of women at 2 percent). Using PAC2’s tool, we can see that of the 8 people born after 1940, one is female (for a share of 12.5 percent).
The number of links can be small, and each date threshold tells a somewhat different story. For example, if we look at people linked from the Physics page and born since 1950, all three are men.
For some pages, such as Book, date thresholds tell us little, as all eighteen biographical links are for men. For other pages, such as Science, filtering by birth date shows a substantially larger share of links to women (12.5 percent overall, but nearly 30 percent of those born after 1950).
PAC2’s tools helps show which pages better acknowledge the contributions of the current generation of women (and/or where the current generation is not yet well enough represented), and which pages continue to amplify the bias of previous generations by failing to link to women entirely.
Read more about bias on Wikipedia here, or check out PAC2s tool for yourself!
