WWC2023/Research
< WWC2023
This research has been conducted thus far on the subject of women, gender, and gender gap in Wikimedia projects. Research has been conducted and published by both individuals and organizations associated with the Wikimedia Foundation as well as external researchers (independent as well as academic-affiliated) on these themes.
The aim behind creating such a pre-reading pack is to allow Strategy Cohort delegates to arrive at the camp with information about the current state of research as well as the gaps that emerge as a result from the research. This will enable more focused and informed discussion of current concerns and challenges and future directions that research should take to account for these.
In particular, we have tried to capture the following points in the summary below:
- Which sister project (Wikipedia, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons, Wikisource, etc.) does the research pertain to?
- Which language version(s) were researched?
- What was the time period in which research was conducted?
- What type of gender gap was researched: consumption (readers), representation/content (quality, quantity, metadata, policies); participation (editors/organizers/developers)?
Types of Gender Gap[edit]
- Content
- Relating to quantity, quality, images, linkage, categories, deletion, citations, policy, and talkpages
- Relating to biographies or real people; fictional characters; works; and issues
- Participation: relating to the number of editors; organizers; leaders; and developers
- Consumption: relating to the number of readership; consumption through social media
Main Research[edit]
| Research | Year of publication | Year research was conducted | Year & type of data dump | Type | Project / language | Methods / Notes | Key findings |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Farič N, Potts HWW, Heilman J. Quality of Male and Female Medical Content on English-Language Wikipedia: A Quantitative Content Analysis. JMIR 2023. (Submitted) | Pending | 2019 to 2023 | Content | Wikipedia - English (mostly) | Healthcare | "In the top 1,000 most read medical articles on the English-language Wikipedia, there were three times as many articles pertaining to female health compared to male health, which can be explained by a much greater number of conditions associated with the menstrual cycle, gynaecology and childbirth. However, across a number of metrics, the quality of WP’s health-related articles for both sexes was comparable." | |
| Conroy, Melanie (11 May 2023). "Quantifying the Gap: The Gender Gap in French Writers' Wikidata". Journal of Cultural Analytics, Vol. 8, Issue 2. Retrieved 22 May 2023. | 2023 | 2022 | content | Wikidata | French and Francophone writers | “... the gender gap is less significant in recent periods and in smaller Wikidata communities and that the largest Wikidata communities with the longest histories have larger gender gaps. As in other subject fields, literary topics in Wikidata are disproportionately linked to male authors.” | |
| Venus, Nicole (14 August 2023). "The Representation of Female Economists on Wikipedia". SSRN 4540744 | 2023 | 2022 | content | Wikipedia - English | Female economists. | “For a large sample of actively-publishing economists I document that women are less than half as likely to have a biographical entry on the English-language Wikipedia than men … however, this gap is increasingly closing … First, there is a strong increase in contributions by Wikipedia editors affiliated to projects aimed at reducing the gender imbalance on the platform … Second, while Wikipedia editors not affiliated to activist groups were over-selecting men in the 2000s when creating new entries, they appear to have selected subjects in a gender-neutral way in the 2010s.” | |
| Fan, Angela; Gardent, Claire (30 March 2022). "Generating Full Length Wikipedia Biographies: The Impact of Gender Bias on the Retrieval-Based Generation of Women Biographies" (PDF). ACL. Retrieved 31 March 2022. | 2022 | 2021 | content | Wikipedia - English | Developing a model to generate factual, long-form biographies using web data | “To assess the impact of available web evidence on the output text, we compare the performance of our approach when generating biographies about women (for which less information is available on the web) vs. biographies generally. To this end, we curate a dataset of 1,500 biographies about women.” | |
| Langrock, Isabelle; González-Bailón, Sandra (June 2022). "The Gender Divide in Wikipedia: Quantifying and Assessing the Impact of Two Feminist Interventions". Journal of Communication. 72 (3): 297–321. doi:10.1093/joc/jqac004. | 2022 | content | Wikipedia - English | Gender divide in biographical content | “bias not only shapes social perceptions of knowledge, but it can also propagate beyond the platform as its contents are leveraged to correct misinformation, train machine-learning tools, and enhance search engine results … interventions are successful at adding content about women that would otherwise be missing, but they are less successful at addressing structural biases that limit the visibility of that content.” | ||
| Beytía, Pablo; Wagner, Claudia (22 March 2022). "Visibility layers: a framework for systematising the gender gap in Wikipedia content". Internet Policy Review. 11 (1). doi:10.14763/2022.1.1621. | 2022 | 2020 | content | Wikipedia - English | Theoretical framework to organize the complexity of the gender gap on Wikipedia | “We interpret Wikipedia as a 'field of visibility' and provide a framework to systemise its content gaps. Then we use that model to organise the complexity of the content gender gap on Wikipedia, performing a systematic overview of the asymmetries tested in empirical research. We suggest that this analysis is relevant for the effective planning of governance processes that seek to avoid female or non-male subordination in digital platforms' discourses.” | |
| Zhang, Charles Chuankai; Terveen, Loren (15 October 2021). "Quantifying the Gap: A Case Study of Wikidata Gender Disparities". ACM Digital Library. Retrieved 23 May 2023. | 2021 | 2020 | 2019 - Wikidata | content | Wikidata | “Wikidata is no more biased than the real world: men and women are included at similar percentages, and the quality of items representing men and women also is similar.” | |
| Falenska, Agnieszka; Çetinoglu, Özlem (2021). Assessing Gender Bias in Wikipedia: Inequalities in Article Titles (PDF). ACL. pp. 75–85. Retrieved 4 September 2023. | 2021 | content | Wikipedia - (multiple) Turkish, English, German, Polish | Gender-related asymmetries in Wikipedia titles from all domains | “... for only half of gender-related articles, i.e., articles with words such as women or male in their titles, symmetrical counterparts describing the same concept for the other gender (and clearly stating it in their titles) exist. Among the remaining imbalanced cases, the vast majority of articles concern sports- and social-related issues.” | ||
| Sun, Jiao; Peng, Nanyun (2021). Men Are Elected, Women Are Married: Events Gender Bias on Wikipedia (PDF). ACL. arXiv:2106.01601. Retrieved 4 September 2023. | 2021 | content | Wikipedia - English | “Our study discovers that Wikipedia pages tend to intermingle personal life events with professional events for females but not for males, which calls for the awareness of the Wikipedia community to formalize guidelines and train the editors to mind the implicit biases that contributors carry.” | |||
| Schmahl, Katja Geertruida; Viering, Tom Julian; Makrodimitris1, Stavros; Naseri Jahfari, Arman; Tax, David M. J.; Loog, Marco (2020). Is Wikipedia succeeding in reducing gender bias? Assessing changes in gender bias in Wikipedia using word embeddings (PDF). ALC. doi:10.18653/v1/2020.nlpcss-1.11. S2CID 226283827. Retrieved 4 September 2023. | 2020 | 2006-20 - Wikipedia | content | Wikipedia | Gender bias from word-embeddings in Wikipedia | “... art related words have become more female biased. Family and science words have stereotypical biases towards respectively female and male words … Career related words are more strongly associated with male than with females.” | |
| Bolón Brun, Natalie; Kypraiou, Sofia; Gullón Altés, Natalia; Petlacalco Barrios, Irene (April 2020). Wikigender: A Machine Learning Model to Detect Gender Bias in Wikipedia (PDF). Wiki Workshop 2020. arXiv:2211.07520. Retrieved 4 September 2023. | 2020 | 2019 - Wikipedia | content | Wikipedia - English | Gender bias in biographies | “... the adjectives used to portray women have a higher subjectivity than the ones used to describe men … women are related to family while men are related to business and sports.” | |
| Zheng, Xiang; Chen, Jiajing; Yan, Erjia; Ni, Chaoqun (February 2023). "Gender and country biases in Wikipedia citations to scholarly publications". JASIST. 74 (2). doi:10.1002/asi.24723 | 2020 | 2020 | content | Wikipedia - English | Gender and country biases in Wikipedia citation practices | “publications by women are cited less by Wikipedia than expected, and publications by women are less likely to be cited than those by men. Scholarly publications by authors affiliated with non-Anglosphere countries are also disadvantaged … the gender-country intersectional bias is prominent in math-intensive STEM fields.” | |
| Schellekens, Menno; Holstege, Floris; Yasseri, Taha (12 April 2019). "Female scholars need to achieve more for equal public recognition". arXiv:1904.06310. | 2019 | content | Wikipedia - English | “... women in Physics, Economics and Philosophy are considerably less likely than men to be recognised on Wikipedia across all levels of achievement.” | |||
| Adams, Julia; Bruckner, Hannah; Naslund, Cambria (2019). "Who Counts as a Notable Sociologist on Wikipedia? Gender, Race, and the "Professor Test"". Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World. 5: 1–14. doi:10.1177/2378023118823946. | 2019 | content | Wikipedia - English | “In contrast to the demographic diversity of the discipline, sociologists represented on Wikipedia are largely white men. The gender and racial/ethnic gaps in likelihood of representation have exhibited little change over time. Using novel data, we estimate the “risk” of having a Wikipedia page for a sample of contemporary sociologists. We show that the observed differences (in academic rank, length of career, and notability measured with both H-index and departmental reputation) between men and women sociologists and whites and nonwhites, respectively, explain only about half of the differences in the likelihood of being represented on Wikipedia. The article also enumerates both supply- and demand-side mechanisms that may account for these continuing gaps in representation.” | |||
| Luo, Wei; Adams, Julia; Brueckner, Hannah (2018). "The Ladies Vanish? American Sociology and the Genealogy of its Missing Women on Wikipedia". Comparative Sociology. 17 (5): 519–556. doi:10.1163/15691330-12341471. | 2018 | content | Wikipedia - English | “This article explores multiple mechanisms by which women either enter or disappear from the disciplinary record by analyzing the unfolding interaction between the canonical disciplinary history of sociology and Wikipedia. We argue that the uneven representation of women sociologists as (1) remembered, (2) neglected, (3) erased or, finally, (4) recovered is shaped by the emerging interactional space of knowledge production.” | |||
| Vitulli, Marie A. (20 October 2017). "Writing Women in Mathematics into Wikipedia". arXiv:1710.11103v3. | 2017 | content | Wikipedia - English | Women in mathematics. | “writing women in mathematics into Wikipedia” | ||
| Hube, Christoph (3 April 2017). "Bias in Wikipedia" (PDF). Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on World Wide Web Companion - WWW '17 Companion. Semantic Scholar. pp. 717–721. doi:10.1145/3041021.3053375. ISBN 9781450349147. S2CID 10472970. Retrieved 16 September 2019. | 2017 | content | Wikipedia - English | “An approach for detecting both explicit and implicit bias in Wikipedia articles and observing its evolution over time is developed, based on different factors of bias, with the most important ones being language style, editors, and citations.” | |||
| Zagovora, Olga; Flöck, Fabian; Wagner, Claudia. ""(Weitergeleitet von Journalistin)": The Gendered Presentation of Professions on Wikipedia". arXiv:1706.03848. | 2017 | content | Wikipedia - German; Wikimedia Commons | “Our work assesses gender bias with respect to the content of German Wikipedia articles about professions and occupations along three dimensions: used male vs. female titles (and redirects), included images of persons, and names of professionals mentioned in the articles. We further use German labor market data to assess the potential misrepresentation of a gender for each specific profession. Our findings in fact provide evidence for systematic over-representation of men on all three dimensions. “ | |||
| Klein, Maximilian; et al. (2016). "Monitoring the Gender Gap with Wikidata Human Gender Indicators" (PDF). Berlin: OpenSym. Retrieved 1 September 2023 – via Internet Archive. | 2016 | content | Wikidata | Using Wikidata data sets to understand Wikipedia’s content gender gap. | |||
| Wagner, Claudia; Graells-Garrido, Eduardo; Garcia, David; Menczer, Filippo (1 March 2016). "Women through the glass ceiling: gender asymmetries in Wikipedia". EPJ Data Science. 5. arXiv:1601.04890. doi:10.1140/epjds/s13688-016-0066-4. S2CID 1769950. | 2016 | content | Wikipedia - English | “... assess potential gender inequalities in Wikipedia articles along different dimensions: notability, topical focus, linguistic bias, structural properties, and meta-data presentation.” | |||
| Young, Amber; Wigdor, Ari; Kane, Gerald C. (December 2016). "It's Not What You Think: Gender Bias in Information about Fortune 1000 CEOs on Wikipedia". International Conference for Information Systems, Dublin. Retrieved 2 September 2023. | 2016 | content | Wikipedia - English | “... study bias stemming from structural constraints and content restrictions …” | |||
| Klein, Maximilian (2 December 2015). "Wikipedia Gender Indicators (WIGI)". WMF labs. Retrieved 1 September 2023. | 2015 | content | Wikidata | Using Wikidata data sets to understand Wikipedia’s content gender gap. | |||
| Klein, Maximilian; Konieczny, Piotr (2015). "Gender Gap Through Time and Space: A Journey Through Wikipedia Biographies and the "WIGI" Index". arXiv:1502.03086 [cs.CY]. (Interesting study, currently under peer review) | 2015 | content | Wikidata, Wikipedia | Biographies; WIGI Index. | “... Wikipedia Gender Index (WIGI), based on metadata available through the Wikidata database.” | ||
| Graells-Garrido, Eduardo; Lalmas, Mounia; Menczer, Filippo (2015). "First Women, Second Sex: Gender Bias in Wikipedia". Proceedings of the 26th ACM Conference on Hypertext & Social Media. p. 165. arXiv:1502.02341. doi:10.1145/2700171.2791036. ISBN 978-1-4503-3395-5. S2CID 1082360. | 2015 | content | Wikipedia - English | Characterization of women. | An analysis of the DBPedia Wikipedia subset shows that 15% of biographies are of women.
“... gender bias is not about participation and representation only, but also about characterization of women.” | ||
| Wagner, Claudia; Garcia, David; Jadidi, Mohsen; Strohmaier, Markus (2015). "It's a Man's Wikipedia? Assessing Gender Inequality in an Online Encyclopedia". arXiv:1501.06307 [cs.CY]. | 2015 | content | Wikipedia - English | “... the way women are portrayed starkly differs from the way men are portrayed” | |||
| Ridge, Mia (2013). "New Challenges in Digital History: Sharing Women's History on Wikipedia". Women's History in the Digital World. Retrieved 4 September 2023. | 2013 | content | Wikipedia | “... how digital publishing could intervene in the cycle of remembering and forgetting that seemed to be the fate of brilliant women throughout history…” | |||
| Joseph M. Reagle Jr.Joseph M. Reagle Jr. Rhue, Lauren (2011). "Gender Bias in Wikipedia and Britannica". International Journal of Communication. Joseph Reagle & Lauren Rhue. 5: 1138–1158. Archived from the original on 22 March 2016. Retrieved 1 May 2014. | 2011 | content | Wikipedia | “Is there a bias against women’s representation in Wikipedia biographies? Thousands of biographical subjects from six sources are compared against the English-language Wikipedia and the online Encyclopædia Britannica with respect to coverage, gender representation, and article length. We conclude that Wikipedia provides better coverage and longer articles, and that it typically has more articles on women than Britannica in absolute terms, but we also find that Wikipedia articles on women are more likely to be missing than articles on men relative to Britannica. For both reference works, article length did not consistently differ by gender.’ | |||
| Pablo Aragon, David Laniado, Andreas Kaltenbrunner, and Yana Volkovich. 2012. Biographical social networks on Wikipedia: a cross-cultural study of links that made history. In Proceedings of the Eighth Annual International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration (WikiSym '12). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 19, 1–4. | 2012 | content | Wikipedia- English | Approx 6,000 editors with at least 100
comments on talk pages, crowdsourcing assessment of gender, measured emotional content of comments using Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW) |
Women tend to participate in discussions with a more positive tone. Editors having similar emotional styles are more likely to interact with each other. | ||
| Schrijver, Paul (2016-05-25). "Gender gap on Wikipedia: visible in all categories?". University of Amsterdam. (bachelor thesis) | 2016 | content | Wikipedia- English | Registered users on Wikipedia who have
mentioned gender preference and edited at least once (n = 257,157) and edit history classified according to Wikipedia’s categories |
76% of Wikipedia’s categories are overrepresented by either gender, out of which 35% categories are female and 65% are male. | ||
| Gupta, Sneh; Trehan, Kulveen (2022). "Twitter reacts to absence of women on Wikipedia: a mixed-methods analysis of #VisibleWikiWomen campaign". Media Asia. 49 (2): 130–154. doi:10.1080/01296612.2021.2003100. | 2022 | content - images | Wikipedia - English; Wikimedia Commons | Content on Wikipedia, specifically the #VisibleWikiWomen campaign | “An overwhelming majority of tweets expressed positive sentiment towards the objective of the campaign … Their tweets reveal that they want an equal social platform inclusive of women of color and varied identities currently absent in the Wikipedia universe. Extracting ideas, values, and themes from new media campaigns holds unparalleled potential in the diffusion of interventions and messages on a larger scale.” | ||
| Beytía, P.; Agarwal, P.; Redi, M.; Singh, V. K. (December 2021). "Visual Gender Biases in Wikipedia: A Systematic Evaluation across the Ten Most Spoken Languages" (Preprint). SocArXiv. doi:10.31235/osf.io/59rey. S2CID 244806764. Retrieved 22 February 2022. | 2021 | 2020 | content - images | Wikipedia - (multiple) English, Mandarin Chinese, Hindi, Spanish, French, Standard Arabic, Bengali, Russian, Portuguese, and Indonesian; Wikimedia Commons | Visual aspects (image volume or quality) | “(1) much of the male bias in content arises when editors select which personalities should have a Wikipedia page, (2) the trends in written and visual content are quite dissimilar, (3) men biographies tend to have more images across languages, and (4) female biographies average better visual quality.” | |
| Meyer, Christine (May 2022). "'If You Want to Change the World, Edit Wikipedia': Mitigating the Gender Gap and Systemic Bias on Wikipedia". University of Idaho. Retrieved 23 June 2022. | 2022 | 2020-2022 | content, editor | Wikipedia - English | Historical reasons/roots for Wikipedia’s gender gap and systemic bias | “If you want to change the world, edit Wikipedia.”
“... there are fewer female editors and less content about women, especially biographies, than male editors and content about and for men. This thesis describes the scope of the problem and describes historical reasons for it, insisting that it has been due to Wikipedia’s place in the history of the encyclopedia and Enlightenment-era philosophies and the commoditization of knowledge-building.” | |
| Ford, Heather; Wajcman, Judy (2016). "'Anyone can edit' not everyone does: Wikipedia and the gender gap" (PDF). Social Studies of Science : SSS : An International Review of Research in the Social Dimensions of Science and Technology. Social Studies of Science (via LSE). ISSN 0306-3127. Retrieved 18 January 2017. | 2016 | content, editor | Wikipedia - English | “Wikipedia’s infrastructure introduces new and less visible sources of gender disparity” | |||
| Lam, Shyong & Uduwage, Anuradha & Dong, Zhenhua & Sen, Shilad & Musicant, David & Terveen, Loren & Riedl, John. (2011). WP:Clubhouse? An exploration of Wikipedia's gender imbalance. 1-10. 10.1145/2038558.2038560. | 2011 | content, editor | Wikipedia - English | Reverts of self-identified female/male Wikipedians for non-vandalism -related reasons from January 2011 data dump, proportions of male and female protected articles, self-identified female/male Wikipedians editing user and user talk namespaces | Our findings confirm the presence of a large gender gap among editors and a corresponding gender-oriented disparity in the content of Wikipedia's articles. Further, we find evidence hinting at a culture that may be resistant to female participation. | ||
| Klein, Maximilian (15 March 2021). "Humaniki March Update: Public Launch of Alpha Release". Wikimedia. Retrieved 26 March 2021. Humaniki provides a wide variety of gender gap statistics based on Wikidata. | 2021 | content, editor, reader | All WIkimedia projects | Release of Humaniki, a dashboard tool to enable better gender representation | “Humaniki revamps three popular visualizations from WHGI and makes them interactive: gender by country, by wikimedia project, and date of birth. They all have added interactivity.” | ||
| Jemielniak, Dariusz (2016). "breaking the glass ceiling on Wikipedia". Feminist Review. 113: 103–108. JSTOR 44987268. | 2016 | content, editor, reader | Wikipedia | “Wikipedia suffers from a significant gender gap. According to different studies, as little as 8 to 16 percent of editors are female (Lam et al., 2011; Wikimedia Foundation, 2011). These numbers may be somewhat distorted, as some females may choose to opt out of surveys or conceal their gender online in a community that is generally perceived as dominated by males (Hill and Shaw, 2013). Still, it is quite clear that, although for readers the proportions are pretty much equal, for editors the gender gap is really big (Glott et al., 2010; Bywater, 2011) and difficult to explain just by the stereotypical, geek-driven background of Wikipedia or simply the reproduction of inequalities (Morell, 2010).” | |||
| Gerlach, Martin (June 2020). "Metrics for quantifying the gender content gap". Wikimedia. Retrieved 21 March 2021. | 2020 | 2020 | content, reader | All WIkimedia projects | “Care should be taken in using reader attention as a proxy for importance of content given the consistent gender gap in readership and self-focus bias wherein men demonstrate a skew towards reading biographies of men as compared to women … While sparsity of data makes it difficult to include non-binary identities in this work, these identities should not be left out of the discussion or work to close the gaps … There are many articles that are not biographies that have a clear gender dimensions -- e.g. Women’s Health -- that should also be tracked and prioritized for improvement in order to reduce the gender gap.” | ||
| Nicolaes, Feli (2016). "Gender Bias on Wikipedia. An analysis of the affiliation network". scripties.uba.uva.nl. Scripties - Bibliotheek - Universiteit van Amsterdam. Retrieved 2 September 2023. | 2016 | content; editor | Wikipedia - English | “... while a clear gender gap is present in the users and person/biography pages, no evidence of the previously suggested homophily was found.” | |||
| Oldach, Laurel (8 March 2022). "What's with Wikipedia and women?". ASBMBTODAY. Retrieved 11 March 2022. | 2022 | 2022 | content; policy | Wikipedia - English | Gender-gap, and Women in Red, and UCoC as measures to address it | “The 22,000 biographies that landed in Articles for Deletion conversations were disproportionately likely to be about women. But pages about women were more likely than pages about men to be retained after discussion. She [researcher Francesca Tripodi] called these miscategorized.” | |
| Tripodi, Francesca (27 June 2021). "Ms. Categorized: Gender, notability, and inequality on Wikipedia". New Media & Society. doi:10.1177/14614448211023772. S2CID 237883867. | 2021 | 2016-2017 | content; policy | Wikipedia - English | Non-notability of women’s biographies | “... biographies about women who meet Wikipedia’s criteria for inclusion are more frequently considered non-notable … women’s achievements are (under)valued.” | |
| Lemieux, Mackenzie Emily; Zhang, Rebecca; Tripodi, Francesca (29 March 2023). ""Too Soon" to count? How gender and race cloud notability considerations on Wikipedia". SAGE journals. Retrieved 2 April 2023. | 2023 | 2022 | policy | Wikipedia - English | Race and gender in biography assessment. | “... Wikipedia's notability guidelines are unequally applied across race and gender. We find that online presence predicts whether a Wikipedia page is kept or deleted for white male academics but that this metric is idiosyncratically applied for female and BIPOC academics. Further, women's pages, regardless of race, were more likely to be deemed “too soon” for Wikipedia … awareness of hidden biases on Wikipedia is critical to the objective and equitable application of the notability criteria across race and gender both on the encyclopedia and beyond.” | |
| Berson, Amber; Sengul-Jones, Monika; Tamani, Melissa (June 2021). "Unreliable Guidelines: Reliable Sources and Marginalized Communities in French, English and Spanish Wikipedias" (PDF). Art+Feminism. | 2021 | 2020-2021 | policy | Wikipedia - (multiple) English, French, and Spanish | Reliability guidelines and marginalized communities | “source authority is facilitated by social and technical processes which elevate the decisions of a small number of self- selected editors … texts about reliability between different language versions of Wikipedia tend to center Western knowledge formations … Reliability should not mean exclusion …” |
| Research | Year of publication | Year research was conducted | Year & type of data dump | Type | Project / language | Methods / Notes | Key findings |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chakraborty, Anwesha; Hussain, Netha (7 March 2022). "Documenting the gender gap in Indian Wikipedia communities: Findings from a qualitative pilot study". First Monday. 27 (3). doi:10.5210/fm.v27i3.11443 | 2022 | editor | Wikipedia | Editor participation in Indian communities. | “The responses corroborated with the existing literature on gender gap in Wikipedia with respect to issues of Internet access, lack of discretionary time, psychological barriers and institutional harassment. The personal narratives also revealed unique problems faced by Indian women which relate to existing socio-cultural norms creating barriers for participation by women. Our findings show that the limits to accessing the Internet and technological devices are experienced by women irrespective of their educational degrees and technical skills, because of the patriarchal mindset that pervades both at home and in the society at large.” | ||
| Lir, Shlomit Aharoni (2021). "Strangers in a seemingly open-to-all website: the gender bias in Wikipedia". Equality, Diversity and Inclusion. 40 (7): 801–818. doi:10.1108/EDI-10-2018-0198. | 2021 | editor | Wikipedia - English | Interlinkage between different gender-based barriers on Wikipedia | “… pre-editing barriers of negative reputation, lack of recognition, anonymity and fear of being erased; and post-editing barriers of experiences of rejection, alienation, lack of time and profit and ownership of knowledge … enhance each other, in a manner that deters women from contributing to the website” | ||
| Minguillón, Julià; Mesneses, Julio; Aibar, Eduard; Ferran-Ferrer, Núria (23 February 2021). "Exploring the gender gap in the Spanish Wikipedia: Differences in engagement and editing practices". PLOS One. 16 (2): e0246702. Bibcode:2021PLoSO..1646702M. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0246702. PMC 7901774. PMID 33621229. | 2021 | 2017 - Wikipedia | editor | Wikipedia - Spanish | Measuring percentages, engagement, and editing practices of women editors | “women editors … tend to leave Wikipedia much more quickly” | |
| Ferran-Ferrer, Núria; Castellanos-Pineda, Patricia; Minguillón, Julià; Meneses, Julio (September 6, 2021). "The gender gap on the Spanish Wikipedia: Listening to the voices of women editors". El Profesional de la Información. 30 (5). doi:10.3145/epi.2021.sep.16. S2CID 241442991. Retrieved October 13, 2021. | 2021 | 2018 - semi-structured interviews | 2017 - Wikipedia | editor | Wikipedia - Spanish | Editing practices | “ … edit-a-thons … have emerged as self-inclusion strategies to enable more women to enter, remain, and be recognized in this male-dominated editing environment. Smaller Wikipedia communities are also perceived as more inclusive environments.” |
| Menking, Amanda; Erickson, Ingrid; Pratt, Wanda (2019). "People Who Can Take It: How Women Wikipedians Negotiate and Navigate Safety in Proceedings of CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Proceedings (CHI 2019)". ACM, New York. Retrieved 5 December 2021. | 2019 | editor | Wikipedia - English | “identity management, boundary management, and emotion work.” | |||
| Björn Ross, Marielle Dado, Maritta Heisel, Benjamin Cabrera, Gender Markers in Wikipedia Usernames, Wiki Workshop, April 2018, Lyon, France | 2018 | editor | Wikipedia - English | Examination as to “whether users with obviously female names receive fewer replies than users with obviously male names”. | |||
| Hinnosaar, Marit (May 2015). "Gender Inequality in New Media: Evidence from Wikipedia". Carlo Alberto Notebooks. EconPapers. ISSN 2279-9362. Retrieved 18 January 2017. | 2015 | editor | Wikipedia - English | survey on Amazon Mechanical Turk (n=974), mostly US IPs, hypothesized article contribution | “... (1) gender differences in the frequency of Wikipedia use and in beliefs about one's competence explain a large share of the gender gap in Wikipedia writing; (2) the gender gap among contributors leads to unequal coverage of topics; (3) providing information about gender inequality has a large effect on contributions.” | ||
| Helgeson, Björn (2015). The Swedish Wikipedia Gender Gap (PDF) (MSc). KTH. Retrieved 4 September 2023. | 2015 | editor | Wikipedia - Swedish | Banners shown to both logged in and logged out users on sv-wiki (n=2700) | “The results indicate that there is indeed a big disproportion, and that only between 13-19% of editors are women.” | ||
| Massa, Paolo; Zelenkauskaite, Asta (2014). "Gender Gap in Wikipedia Editing: A Cross Language Comparison" (PDF). In Fichman, Pnina; Hara, Noriko (eds.). Global Wikipedia: International and Cross-Cultural Issues in Online Collaboration. Lanham: Rowman et Littlefield. pp. 85–96. | 2014 | editor | Wikipedia | “The issue of gender distribution on Wikipedia was first brought to public attention by an article in the New York Times in January 2011. The article, titled “Define Gender Gap? Look Up Wikipedia’s Contributor List,”3 started by highlighting how, in just ten years, the Wikipedia community accomplished some remarkable goals, such as reaching more than 3.5 million articles in English and starting an online encyclopedia in more than 250 languages. Yet Wikipedia failed to reach at least a minimal gender balance” | |||
| Hargittai, Eszter; Shaw, Aaron (4 November 2014). "Mind the skills gap: the role of Internet know-how and gender in differentiated contributions to Wikipedia". Information, Communication & Society. Informa UK: Information, Communication & Society, Vol 18. 18 (4): 424–442. doi:10.1080/1369118X.2014.957711. S2CID 143468397. | 2014 | editor | Wikipedia - English | Young adults in the US, surveyed
twice (n=547), paper-pencil method, assessed for internet use patterns, whether they edit Wikipedia |
“Our findings suggest that efforts to understand the gender gap must also take Internet skills into account.” Gender gap in editing is
exacerbated by an internet skills gap. Most likely contributors are high skilled males, among low skilled internet users, no gender gap exists. | ||
| Hill, Benjamin Mako; Shaw, Aaron (26 June 2013). "The Wikipedia Gender Gap Revisited: Characterizing Survey Response Bias with Propensity Score Estimation". PLOS ONE. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0065782. | 2013 | editor | Wikipedia | “Accurately describing the demographics of individuals who contribute to Wikipedia, the largest volunteer-written, free knowledge resource on the Internet, as well as other “peer production” communities, presents challenges to traditional sampling and survey methods” | |||
| Young, Amber G; Wigdor, Ariel D.; Kane, Gerald C. (2020). "The Gender Bias Tug-of-War in a Co-creation Community: Core-Periphery Tension on Wikipedia". Journal of Management Information Systems. 37 (4): 1047=1072. doi:10.1080/07421222.2020.1831773. | 2020 | editor; content | Wikipedia - English | Gender bias in biographies | “Peripheral contributors are likely to contribute traditional types of information bias (e.g., bias against women). In response, central contributors may overcorrect in ways that reverse traditional biases. We compare gender bias on female and male CEO profiles and find evidence of bias that advantages women and disadvantages men.” | ||
| Cabrera, Benjamin; Ross, Björn; Dado, Marielle; Heisel, Maritta (15 June 2018). "The Gender Gap in Wikipedia Talk Pages". Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media. 12 (1). doi:10.1609/icwsm.v12i1.15053. ISSN 2334-0770. Retrieved 2 September 2023. | 2018 | editor; content | Wikipedia - English | Quantifying “... that the conflicts that take place in talk pages are especially intimidating for women.” | |||
| Collier, Benjamin & Bear, Julia. (2012). Conflict, confidence, or criticism: An empirical examination of the gender gap in wikipedia. Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, CSCW. 383-392. 10.1145/2145204.2145265. | 2012 | participation | Wikipedia | UNU-MERIT survey, banners shown to
all readers (n=40,699) |
Female Wikipedia users have a lower confidence in their expertise and lower confidence in the value of their contribution. Female contributors prefer to share and collaborate rather than delete and change. No evidence to infer that women have less discretionary time available for contributing. Female Wikipedia users perceive high level of conflict. Women report more discomfort in editing other's work (which typically involves conflict) and more negative responses to critical feedback. | ||
| Amichai-Hamburger, Y., Lamdan, N., Madiel, R., & Hayat, T. (2008). Personality characteristics of Wikipedia members. Journal of Cybertherapy and Rehabilitation, 11(6), 679–681. https://doi.org/10.1089/cpb.2007.0225 | 2008 | participation | Wikipedia | Online questionnaire to test personality traits (n
= 139, both Wikipedians and non-Wikipedians, men and women) |
"It was found that Wikipedia members locate their real me on the Internet more frequently as compared to non-Wikipedia members. Variance analysis revealed significant differences between Wikipedia members and non-Wikipedia members in agreeableness, openness, and conscientiousness, which were lower for the Wikipedia members. An interaction was found between Wikipedia membership and gender: introverted women were more likely to be Wikipedia members as compared with extroverted women." | ||
| Antin, J., Yee, R., Cheshire, C., & Nov, O. (2011). Gender differences in Wikipedia editing. Int. Sym. Wikis. | 2011 | participation | Wikipedia | Users who created valid new account and
optionally disclosed gender on en-wiki (n=437) from Sep 2010 to Feb 2011 |
"First, we find that the so-called "Gender Gap" in number of editors may not be as wide as prior studies have suggested. Second, although more than 80% of editors in our sample were men, among the bottom 75% of editors by activity-level, we find that men and women made similar numbers of revisions. However, among the most active Wikipedians men tended to make many more revisions than women. Finally, we find that the most active women in our sample tended to make larger revisions than the most active men." | ||
| Wilson, Jason "Are misogynists running Wikipedia?", Overland, 11 February 2015. | 2015 | participation - editor; Administrator | Wikipedia - English | “Are misogynists running Wikipedia?” |
| Research | Year of publication | Year research was conducted | Year & type of data dump | Type | Project / language | Methods / Notes | Key findings |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Johnson, Isaac; Lemmerich, Florian; Sáez-Trumper, Diego; Strohmaier, Markus; West, Robert; Zia, Leila (20 July 2020). "Global gender differences in Wikipedia readership". arXiv:2007.10403. | 2020 | 2019 | reader | Wikipedia - (multiple) English, Russian, German, French, Spanish, Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, Hungarian, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Ukrainian, Chinese | Readership of women on Wikipedia in multiple languages | “(1) women are underrepresented among readers of Wikipedia, (2) women view fewer pages per reading session than men do, (3) men and women visit Wikipedia for similar reasons, and (4) men and women exhibit specific topical preferences” | |
| Bourdeloie, Hélène; Vicente, Michaël (2014). "Contributing to Wikipedia: A Question of Gender ''. In Fichman, Pnina; Hara, Noriko (eds.). Global Wikipedia: International and Cross-Cultural Issues in Online Collaboration. Lanham: Rowman et Littlefield. | 2014 | reader; editor | All Wikipedias | “In every country, Wiki-Work (participation in the Wikipedia project) differs according to gender—the proportions of users and contributors are much higher for men” | |||
| Protonotarios, I., Sarimpei, V., & Otterbacher, J. (2016). Similar gaps, different origins? Women readers & editors at Greek Wikipedia. AAAI Workshop - Technical Report, WS-16-16-, 80–87 | 2016 | readership, participation | Wikipedia - Greek | Banners shown to both logged in and
logged out users on gr-wiki (n=359 readers, 78 editors) |
"1) women readers more often lack confidence withrespect to their knowledge and technical skills as comparedto men, and 2) women’s behaviors may be driven by per-sonal motivations such as enjoyment and learning, rather thanby “leaving their mark” on the community, a concern morecommon among men. Interestingly, while similar proportionsof men and women readers use multiple language editions,more women contribute to English Wikipedia in addition tothe Greek language community. " |
Wikimedia Foundation Research[edit]
| Research | Methods | Key findings |
|---|---|---|
| Interpolating quality dynamics in Wikipedia and demonstrating the Keilana effect | Research between 2016-17English WikipediaDeveloped a method for quality prediction of articles on English Wikipedia | Mean weighted sum predictions for articles about women scientists were plotted over time to show that, after the announcement of WikiProject Women Scientists, the quality gap rapidly closed and a massive surplus began to grow, well above the quality of the rest of Wikipedia. |
| Gender Equity Report | Research from 2018
65 Wikimedians who led gender equity projects were interviewed. |
Comprehensive study mapping the best practices and barriers to equity for women on WIkimedia. |
| Knowledge gaps index | Research from 2022-23 | Framework and index for measuring knowledge gaps in the Wikimedia projects. |
| How many women edit Wikipedia? | Research from 2015
Review of the demographic surveys related to participation of women on Wikipedia |
Approximately 9-22% of the editors are likely to be female, in studies conducted using different methodology. |