Gender bias on Wikipedia: Difference between revisions

Wikipedia editors are predominantly male

Wikipedia has been accused of gender bias by many, with places such as The Daily Dot claiming that Wikipedia is dominated by men. Some people, however, dispute that claim, with Dean Esmay claiming that there is instead a feminist bias on Wikipedia.

Literature review

As it stands, there are few articles that directly discuss the prevalence of gender bias on Wikipedia specifically. There are, however, academic discussions concerning this trend of bias on the internet as a whole, with some examples of bias in other online communities, peer review situations, and forums, that may help illustrate the issue further, but will not be applied in this case because of the site-specific nature of the issue. Illustrating the root of the problem is an article published by the Wikimedia Foundation, publisher of Wikipedia, which shows from a 7-8 month study in 2011 that an average of “90 percent self-identified as males, 9 percent as females and 1 percent as transsexual or transgender”. Fortunately, the numbers of females joining had increased by 4% since the survey the previous year. Startlingly, there was no significant variation in this trend across the different language Wikipedias. The United States reflected the highest percentage of female contributors, at 15%.

The Wikimedia Foundation claims that 14% of editors who joined in 2011 were female compared to 10% for 2010, 9% for 2009, and 8% for 2008, so it would seem that Wikipedia is attracting more female editors each year, however it appears that females either stop editing or leave Wikipedia sooner than males, so the ratio of males remaining to females remaining increases steadily as time passes. Whatever the reasons, the reality that there is a vast gap between male and female editors is clear. Additionally, the 2011 editor survey also showed that individual male contributors make twice as many edits as do female contributors, so the gender gap is not only in number of individual male verses female edits, it also exists in number of overall edits by males and females. As the data does not seem to indicate what percentage of these edits by males or females are content edits as opposed to grammar or spelling edits, it is unclear how this may impact the gender gap overall.

Causes

Gardner provides a few reasons, offered by female Wikipedia editors, as to why this is the case. These include

• a simple lack of user-friendliness in the editing process;
• not having enough free time;
• lack of self confidence;
• aversion to conflict;
• belief that their contributions will be changed or deleted;
• claims to an air of misogyny or hyper-sexualism;
• the masculinity of the language some non-English Wikipedias use is offensive;
• a general lack of a sense of invitation and openness.

Lam et al. suggest, as well, that there may be a culture which is non-inclusive of women on Wikipedia, which may be due to some suggestions that less than 25% of Wikipedia readers are female, a disparity in male-to-female centric topics represented and edited, the tendency for female users to be more active in the social and community aspects of Wikipedia, continued reversions or edits on female-submitted information, or too much controversy. Another potential reason is that public thought forums in general reflect this sort of gender disparity, with a roughly 85%/15% male to female user base.

External links

• Gender gap stories. Wikimedia Foundation.
• Gender gap. Wikimedia Foundation.