Writing about women

Essay

Writing about women

This Wikipedia essay was first published on February 26, 2015 and written by 53 other editors. Essays are not project guidelines, policies, or part of the Wikipedia's Manual of Style. They may or may not have broad support among the Wikipedia commuity. You may edit this essay if you wish, but please do it at the original essay page.

When writing about women on Wikipedia, make sure articles do not use sexist language, perpetuate sexist stereotypes or otherwise demonstrate a prejudice against women.

As of June 2019, 16.7% of editors on the English Wikipedia who have declared a gender say they are female.^[1] The gender disparity, together with the need for reliable sources, contributes to the gender imbalance of our content; as of March 2020, only 18.27% of our biographies are about women.^[2] This page may help to identify the subtle and more obvious ways in which titles, language, images, and linking practices can discriminate against women.

Data

Among editors of the English Wikipedia who specify a gender in their preferences, 115,941 (16.7%) were female and 576,106 male as of 13 June 2019.^[1]^[a]

As of 10 March 2020, the English Wikipedia hosted 1,693,225 biographies, 291,649 (18.27%) of which were about women.^[2] As a result of sourcing issues, almost all biographies before 1900 are of men.^[5]

In 2009 the percentage of biographies of living persons (BLPs) about women was under 20%, but the numbers have been rising steadily since 2012–2013. As of 5 May 2019, the English Wikipedia hosted 906,720 BLPs, according to figures produced by Andrew Gray using Wikidata. Wikidata identified 697,402 of these as male and 205,117 as female.^[b] The percentages of those that specified a gender were 77.06% male and 22.67% female; 0.27% had another gender.^[6]

Male is not the default

Avoid language that makes female the Other to a male Self.^[7]

Researchers have found that Wikipedia articles about women are more likely to contain words such as woman, female and lady, than articles about men are to contain man, male, or gentleman. This suggests that editors write with an assumption of male as the default gender and expect that individuals are assumed to be male unless otherwise stated.^[8]^[9] This tendency is easily countered by removing unnecessary specification of sex or gender. Avoid labelling a Margaret Atwood as a female author or Margaret Thatcher as female politician except in specific sentences or paragraphs in which their gender is explicitly relevant.

Categories are equally susceptible to asymmetric treatment of genders. In April 2013 several media stories noted that editors of the English Wikipedia had begun moving women from Category:American novelists to Category:American women novelists, while leaving men in the main category.^[10]^[11] Labelling a male author as a "writer" and a female author as a "woman writer" presents women as marked—requiring an adjective to differentiate them from a male default.^[12] Symmetry of categories has improved since 2013, but where editors encounter an imbalance they should correct it by moving male subjects to explicitly male categories (for as long as the current consensus regarding gendered categories holds).

Use surnames

In most situations, avoid referring to a woman by her first name, which can serve to infantilize her.^[c] As a rule, after the initial introduction ("Susan Smith is an Australian anthropologist"), refer to women by their surnames ("Smith is the author of ..."). Here is an example of an editor correcting the inappropriate use of a woman's first name.

First names are sometimes needed for clarity. For example, when writing about a family with the same surname, after the initial introductions they can all be referred to by first names. A first name might also be used when a surname is long and double-barreled, and its repetition would be awkward to read and write. When a decision is made to use first names for editorial reasons, use them for both women and men.

Writing the lead

Importance of the lead

According to Graells-Garrido et al. (2015), the lead is a "good proxy for any potential biases expressed by Wikipedia contributors".^[14] The lead may be the only part of an article that is read—especially on mobile devices—so pay close attention to how women are described there. Again, giving women "marked" treatment can convey subtle assumptions to readers.

First woman

"First woman"

An article about a woman does not pass the Finkbeiner test if it mentions that "she's the first woman to ...." The test raises awareness of how gender becomes more important than a person's achievements.

Avoid language that places being a woman ahead of the subject's achievements. Opening the lead with "Smith was the first woman to do X", or "Smith was the first female X", immediately defines her in terms of men who have done the same thing, and it can inadvertently imply: "She may not have been a very good X, but at least she was the first woman."^[15] When prioritizing that the subject is a "first woman", make sure it really is the only notable thing about her. Otherwise start with her own position or accomplishments, and mention the fact that she is a woman afterwards if it is notable.

For example, as of 10 March 2015, Wikipedia described Russian chemist Anna Volkova solely in terms of four first-woman benchmarks.^[16] But the biographies of Indira Gandhi and Margaret Thatcher, as of the same date, began with the positions they held, and only then said that they were the first or only women to have held them.^[17]

Infoboxes

Infoboxes are an important source of metadata (see DBpedia) and a source of discrimination against women. For example, the word spouse is more likely to appear in a woman's infobox than in a man's.^[18]

When writing about a woman who works or has worked as, but is not primarily known for being a model, avoid {{Infobox model}}. It includes parameters for hair and eye colour and previously contained parameters for bust, hip, waist size and weight. The latter were removed in March 2016 following this discussion. If you add an infobox (they are not required), consider using {{Infobox person}} instead.

Relationships

Defining women by their relationships

Shortcuts

Wherever possible, avoid defining a notable woman, particularly in the title or first sentence, in terms of her relationships (wife/mother/daughter of). Do not begin a biography with: "Susan Smith is the daughter of historian Frank Smith and wife of actor John Jones. She is known for her work on game theory." An example of the kind of title the Wikipedia community has rejected is Sarah Brown (wife of Gordon Brown).

Researchers have found that Wikipedia articles about women are more likely to discuss their family, romantic relationships, and sexuality, while articles about men are more likely to contain words about cognitive processes and work. This suggests that Wikipedia articles are objectifying women.^[19]^[d] Women's biographies mention marriage and divorce more often than men's biographies do.^[21] Biographies that refer to the subject's divorce are 4.4 times more likely to be about a woman on the English Wikipedia. The figures are similar on the German, Russian, Spanish, Italian and French Wikipedias.^[e]

[T]he greater frequency and burstiness of words related to cognitive mechanisms in men, as well as the more frequent words related to sexuality in women, may indicate a tendency to objectify women in Wikipedia. ... [M]en are more frequently described with words related to their cognitive processes, while women are more frequently described with words related to sexuality. In the full biography text, the cognitive processes and work concerns categories are more bursty in men biographies, meaning that those aspects of men's lives are more important than others at the individual level."^[15]

A woman's relationships are inevitably discussed prominently when essential to her notability, but try to focus on her own notable roles or accomplishments first. For example, consider starting articles about women who were First Lady of the United States, which is a significant role, with "served as First Lady of the United States from [year] to [year]", followed by a brief summary of her achievements, rather than "is/was the wife of President X".

Marriage

When discussing a woman who is married to a man, write "A is married to B" instead of "A is the wife of B", which casts the male as possessor. Avoid the expression "man and wife", which generalizes the husband and marks the wife. Do not refer to a woman as Mrs. John Smith; when using an old citation that does this, try to find and use the woman's own name, as in: "Susan Smith (cited as Mrs. J. Smith)".

When introducing a woman as the parent of an article subject, avoid the common construction, "Smith was born in 1960 to John Smith and his wife, Susan." Consider whether there is an editorial reason to begin with the father's name. If not, try "Susan Jones and her husband, John Smith" or, if the woman has taken her husband's name, "Susan Smith, née Jones, and her husband, John", or "Susan and John Smith". Where there are several examples of "X and spouse" in an article, alternate the order of male and female names.

Internal links

The focus on relationships in articles about women affects internal linking and therefore search-engine results. One study found that women on Wikipedia are more linked to men than men are linked to women. When writing an article about a woman, if you include an internal link to an article about a man, consider visiting the latter to check that it includes reciprocal information about the relationship; if it merits mention in the woman's article, it is likely germane to his. Failure to mention the relationship in both can affect search algorithms in a way that discriminates against women.^[f]

Language

Gender-neutral language

Use gender-neutral nouns when describing professions and positions: actor, author, aviator, bartender, chair, comedian, firefighter, flight attendant, hero, poet, police officer. Avoid adding gender (female pilot, male nurse) unless the topic requires it.

Do not refer to human beings as a group as man or mankind. Sentences such as "man has difficulty in childbirth" illustrate that these are not inclusive generic terms.^[24] Depending on the context, use humanity, humankind, human beings, women and men, or men and women.

Word order

Some will set the cart before the horse, as thus: "My mother and my father are both at home", even as though the goodman of the house did wear no breeches, or that the gray mare were the better horse. ... in speaking at the least let us keep a natural order and set the man before the woman for manners' sake.

— Thomas Wilson (Arte of Rhetorique, 1553).^[25]

The order in which groups are introduced—man and woman, male and female, Mr. and Mrs., husband and wife, brother and sister, ladies and gentlemen—has implications for their status, so consider alternating the order as you write.^[26]

Girls, ladies

Do not refer to adult women as girls or ladies,^[27] unless using common expressions, proper nouns, or titles that cannot be avoided (e.g., leading lady, lady-in-waiting, ladies' singles, Ladies' Gaelic Football Association, First Lady). The inappropriate use of ladies can be seen in Miss Universe 1956, which on 12 March 2015 said there had been "30 young ladies in the competition", and in Mixer dance, which discussed "the different numbers of men and ladies".^[28]

Pronouns: Avoid generic he

The use of the generic he (masculine pronouns such as he, him, his) is increasingly avoided in sentences that might refer to women and men or girls and boys.^[29] Instead of "each student must hand in his assignment", try one of the following.

Rewrite the sentence in the plural: "students must hand in their assignments."
Use feminine pronouns: "each student must hand in her assignment." This is often done to signal the writer's rejection of the generic he,^[30] the "linguistic equivalent of affirmative action".^[31] See WP:HER.
Alternate between the masculine and feminine in different paragraphs or sections.^[31]
Rewrite the sentence to remove the pronoun: "student assignments must be handed in."
Write out the alternatives—he or she, him or her, his or her; him/her, his/her.
Use a composite form for the nominative—s/he or (s)he.^[32]
Use the singular they: "each student must hand in their assignment". It is most often used with someone, anyone, everyone, no one.^[33]

Singular *they*
Nominative (subject)	Accusative (object)	Dependent possessive pronoun	Independent possessive pronoun	Reflexive
When I tell someone a joke, they laugh.	When I greet a friend, I hug them.	When someone leaves the library, their book is stamped.	A friend lets me borrow theirs.	Each person drives there themselves (or, nonstandard, themself).

Sources

Avoid using openly sexist sources unless there is a strong editorial reason to use them. For example, do not use pornographic or men's websites and magazines (such as AskMen, Playboy, and Maxim) in the biographies of female actors. Be careful not to include trivia that appeals predominantly to men. A source need not be overtly sexist to set a bad example. For example, most women are underrepresented in certain institutions that are slow to change. Often such institutions can be fine to use as a source for men, but for women, not so much.

Images

Avoid images that objectify women. In particular, do not use pornography images in articles that are not about pornography. Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Images states that "photographs taken in a pornography context would normally be inappropriate for articles about human anatomy".

Except when the topic is necessarily tied to it (examples: downblouse and upskirt), avoid examples of male-gaze imagery, where women are presented as objects of heterosexual male appreciation.^[34] When adding an image of part of a woman's body, consider cropping the image to focus on that body part.

When illustrating articles about women's health and bodies, use authoritative medical images wherever possible.

Medical issues

When writing about women's health, make sure medical claims are sourced according to the medical sourcing guideline, WP:MEDRS. As a rule this means avoiding primary sources, which in this context refers to studies in which the authors participated. Rely instead on peer-reviewed secondary sources that offer an overview of several studies. Secondary sources acceptable for medical claims include review articles (systematic reviews and literature reviews), meta-analyses and medical guidelines.

To find these sources, enter the search term (e.g., "mammography") into the National Institutes of Health search engine PubMed at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/, and select "reviews" from the "article types" menu. A search for review articles on "mammography" brings up this list. Or select "customize", then the article type (e.g., meta-analysis or guideline). To check an article type (e.g., P. M. Otto, C. B. Blecher, "Controversies surrounding screening mammography", Missouri Medicine, 111(5), Sep–Oct 2014), open the drop-down menu "Publication type" under the abstract. In this case, the classification is "Review". When in doubt, ask for help at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Medicine.

Notes

^ Women are thought to comprise between 8.5%^[3] and 16.1%^[4] of editors on the English Wikipedia.
^ Another 2,464 had some other value, 1,220 had none, and 517 were not on Wikidata.
^ Milman (2014): "More stylistic choices by journalists further contributed to the paternalistic construction of the [Mothers' movement] protesters as girls and their subjugation to father-like figures ...[T]he press ... infantilized the protesters by referring to them as "the girls" ... and by using their first names rather than referring to them by their family names as is the custom when writing about political figures ..."^[13]
^ Graells-Garrido, Lalmas and Menczer (2015): "Sex-related content is more frequent in women biographies than men's, while cognition-related content is more highlighted in men biographies than women's."^[20]
^ Wagner et al. (2015): "[I]n the English Wikipedia an article about a notable person that mentions that the person is divorced is 4.4 times more likely to be about a woman rather than a man. We observe similar results in all six language editions. For example, in the German Wikipedia an article that mentions that a person is divorced is 4.7 times more likely about a woman, in the Russian Wikipedia its 4.8 times more likely about a woman and in the Spanish, Italian and French Wikipedia it is 4.2 times more likely about a women. This example shows that a lexical bias is indeed present on Wikipedia and can be observed consistently across different language editions. This result is in line with (Bamman and Smith 2014) who also observed that in the English Wikipedia biographies of women disproportionately focus on marriage and divorce compared to those of men."^[22]
^ Wagner et al. (2015): "[W]omen on Wikipedia tend to be more linked to men than vice versa, which can put women at a disadvantage in terms of—for example—visibility or reachability on Wikipedia. In addition, we find that women's romantic relationships and family-related issues are much more frequently discussed in their Wikipedia articles than in articles on men. This suggests differences in how the Wikipedia community conceptualizes notable men and women. Because modern search and recommendation algorithms exploit both structural and lexical information on Wikipedia, women might be discriminated when it comes to ranking articles about notable people. To reduce such effects, the editor community could pay particular attention to the gender balance of links included in articles about men and women, and could adopt a more gender-balanced vocabulary when writing articles about notable people."^[23]

References

^ ^a ^b "Overall ratio of declared genders". quarry.wmflabs.org. 13 June 2019.
^ ^a ^b "Gender by language: All time, as of Mar '20". Wikidata Human Gender Indicators (WHGI).
^ WMF 2011, p. 2.
^ Hill & Shaw 2013.
^ Graells-Garrido, Lalmas & Menczer 2015.
^ Gray, Andrew (6 May 2019). "Gender and deletion on Wikipedia". generalist.org.uk.
^ Jule 2008, p. 13ff.
^ Wagner et al. 2015.
^ "Computational Linguistics Reveals How Wikipedia Articles Are Biased Against Women", MIT Technology Review, 2 February 2015.
Titlow, John Paul (2 February 2015). "More Like Dude-ipedia: Study Shows Wikipedia's Sexist Bias", Fast Company.
^ Amanda Filipacchi (24 April 2013). "Wikipedia's Sexism Toward Female Novelists". The New York Times.
^ Alison Flood (25 April 2013). "Wikipedia bumps women from 'American novelists' category". The Guardian.
^ For marked and unmarked, see Deborah Tannen, "Marked Women, Unmarked Men", The New York Times Magazine, 20 June 1993.
^ Milman 2014, 73.
^ Graells-Garrido, Lalmas & Menczer 2015, p. 3.
^ ^a ^b Graells-Garrido, Lalmas & Menczer 2015, p. 8.
^ Anna Volkova, en.wikipedia.org, accessed 10 March 2015.
^ Indira Gandhi, Margaret Thatcher, en.wikipedia.org, accessed 10 March 2015.
^ Graells-Garrido, Lalmas & Menczer 2015, p. 4.
^ Graells-Garrido, Lalmas & Menczer 2015, pp. 2, 5–6, 8.
^ Graells-Garrido, Lalmas & Menczer 2015, p. 2.
^ Bamman & Smith 2014, p. 369.
^ Wagner et al. 2015, p. 460.
^ Wagner et al. 2015, p. 9.
^ Jule 2008, 14.
^ Wilson 1994, p. 193.
^ APA 2009, pp. 72–73; Hegarty 2014, pp. 69.
^ Eckert & McConnell-Ginet 2003, pp. 38–39; Lakoff 2004, 52–56; Holmes 2004, 151–157; Holmes 2000, pp. 143–155
^ "Miss Universe 1956" and Mixer dance, en.wikipedia.org, accessed 12 March 2015.
^ Huddleston & Pullum 2002, p. 492.
^ McConnell-Ginet 2014, p. 33; Adami 2009, pp. 297–298.

Wilder, Charly (5 July 2013). "Ladies First: German Universities Edit Out Gender Bias", Der Spiegel.
^ ^a ^b Huddleston & Pullum 2002, p. 493.
^ Huddleston & Pullum 2002, p. 493; Adami 2009, pp. 294–295.
^ Huddleston & Pullum 2002, 493; for a history of "singular they", see Bodine 1975, p. 131ff. Also see Whitman 2010.
^ "Male gaze", Geek Feminism Wiki.

Works cited

Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, 6th edition. American Psychological Association. 2009.
"Wikipedia Editors' Survey" (PDF). Wikimedia. Wikimedia Foundation. April 2011.
Adami, Elisabetta (2009). "To each reader his, their, or her pronoun". In Renouf, Antoinette; Kehoe, Andrew (eds.). Corpus Linguistics: Refinements and Reassessments. Rodopi. pp. 281–307.
Bamman, David; Smith, Noel (2014). "Unsupervised Discovery of Biographical Structure from Text" (PDF). Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics. 2: 363–376. doi:10.1162/tacl_a_00189. S2CID 10896312.
Bodine, Ann (1975). "Androcentrism in prescriptive grammar: singular 'they,' sex-indefinite 'he,' and 'he or she'". Language in Society. 4 (2): 129–146. doi:10.1017/S0047404500004607. JSTOR 4166805. S2CID 146362006.
Eckert, Penelope; McConnell-Ginet, Sally (2003). Language and Gender. New York: Cambridge University Press.
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 - HT '15. New York: Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 165–174. arXiv:1502.02341. doi:10.1145/2700171.2791036. ISBN 9781450333955. S2CID 1082360.
Hegarty, Peter (2014). "Ladies and gentlemen: Word order and gender in English". In Corbett, Greville G. (ed.). The Expression of Gender. Walter de Gruyter.
Hill, Benjamin Mako; Shaw, Aaron (2013). "The Wikipedia Gender Gap Revisited: Characterizing Survey Response Bias with Propensity Score Estimation". PLOS ONE. 8 (6): e65782. Bibcode:2013PLoSO...865782H. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0065782. PMC 3694126. PMID 23840366.
Holmes, Janet (2004). "Power, Ladies and Linguistic Politeness". In Bucholtz, Mary (ed.). Language and Woman's Place: Text and Commentaries. New York: Oxford University Press.
Holmes, Janet (2000). "Ladies and gentlemen: corpus analysis and linguistic sexism". In Mair, Christine; Hundt, Marianne (eds.). Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory. Freiburg im Breisgau: 20th International Conference on English Language Research on Computerized Corpora, 1999. pp. 143–155.
Huddleston, Rodney; Pullum, Geoffrey K. (2002). The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Jule, Allyson (2008). A Beginner's Guide to Language and Gender. Multilingual Matters.
Lakoff, Robin Tolmach (2004) [1975]. Bucholtz, Mary (ed.). Language and Woman's Place: Text and Commentaries. New York: Oxford University Press.
McConnell-Ginet, Sally (2014). "Gender and its relation to sex: The myth of 'natural' gender". In Corbett, Greville G. (ed.). The Expression of Gender. Walter de Gruyter.
Milman, Noa (2014). "Mothers, Mizrahi, and Poor: Contentious Media Framings of Mothers' Movements". In Woehrle, Lynne M. (ed.). Intersectionality and Social Change. Bingley: Emerald Group Publishing Limited. pp. 53–82.
Wagner, Claudia; Garcia, David; Jadidi, Mohsen; Strohmaier, Markus (2015). "It's a Man's Wikipedia? Assessing Gender Inequality in an Online Encyclopedia". Proceedings of the Ninth International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media: 454–463. arXiv:1501.06307v1.
Whitman, Neal (4 March 2010). "Do's and Don'ts for Singular 'They'". vocabulary.com.
Wilson, Thomas (1994) [1553]. Medine, Peter E. (ed.). The Art of Rhetoric. Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press.

Discuss this story

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Having created a few articles about pre-1900 British women, it has become clear to me that because their contemporary "authoritative" sources tend to be based on the concept of a male-dominated society, and because high-achieving women in the pre-1900 society often had to practice under the name of their male work superior or their male relative - that Wikipedia's rules of evidence should be adjusted for biographies of such women. I believe that it should be OK for an editor to clearly demonstrate and explain a deduction (with sources for the premises) that a woman is likely to have achieved, or possibly achieved this or that in the name of a male - without the editor being accused of original research or similar misdemeanour. So long as such an editorial process is made clear, that sort of editing should not be deleted. In that case, such a deduction could be balanced by a comment that the achievement could also have been collaborative, or solely the man's work, where appropriate. If we don't give space for this, in a proper and controlled manner of course, then we are probably never going to get a fair balance of articles about British pre-1900 women. (NB I only really have extensive experience of researching British women, and I leave it to others to decide if my comments should also apply to women of other countries). Storye book (talk) 19:07, 29 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
On what would such a deduction be based? 207.161.86.162 (talk) 04:57, 1 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Premises and a conclusion, as I said. The premises could be anything, if WP could dare to move on from authoritative third-party peer-reviewed quotable statement. That means using what are currently called primary sources (but which are not all necessarily really primary - such as a published-online famous art establishment catalogue, for example). It could be a deduction based on who is dead and who isn't, who runs the company, and who is formally credited for the work, and who, when all other possibilities are eliminated, remains responsible for the company production. If we are to look beyond the patriarchal records of the era in question, then we must be prepared to look beyond WP's rules about sources, and be prepared to stop mudslinging accusations of OR and the like at editors writing female biographies. Ideally, of course it would be good to end up with an all-third-party-authoritative sources article, but the initial start-class article should be permitted to contain a fair proportion of primary sources if they are shown as reasonable indications of female achievement or other notability. I am currently working on an example of this type of thing, and under WP rules I cannot create an article about it at all. I am currently decrypting a number of (currently unpublished) ca.1904 writings in a unique, self-invented code created by a young woman who was studying Latin and Greek and teaching piano, while suffering an unnamed debilitating illness. The evidence for this is the writing itself, plus various sources for her background. Almost all of the evidence is primary in WP terms. I shall be publishing the writings on Commons in due course, but the sources are still primary. On that basis, any article about her would be deleted, yet she invented (or at the very least, co-invented) something. It is a pity that WP's inflexibility on this point means that her achievement will go unrecognised. Storye book (talk) 14:54, 2 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Not dismissing the proposal, I'm open to the idea of Wikipedia originally publishing research, however, if you publish your work, Storye book, through a reliable channel, for example, a journal article, that then can be used as a reliable source. So it's not inevitable that this women will always go unrecognized.--3family6 (Talk to me | See what I have done) 00:15, 11 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you 3family6 for the encouragement. However those academic journals which I have seen in the past have aligned themselves not only with specific areas of discipline, but to be published there you have to be responding to a current, specific, narrow discussion theme. The subject that I've described above doesn't fit in anywhere. Most of my stuff doesn't - that's why my research has always been independent. If you are looking to please a publisher, particular audience or employer, you can never research the kind of left-of-field subjects that I go for. If you know of any academic journal which covers the area that I'm working in, please let me know? Storye book (talk) 10:03, 11 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Have you tried WikiJournal of Humanities, Storye book? I'm presuming that you don't have enough material for a book-length monograph? There also are a lot of scholarly websites that might be interested: Women's History Network (has links to sites, journals, etc., that might have possibilities), HistoryNet, H-Women, Women's International Center, Women's History (by ThoughtCo). I'm just spit-balling here.--3family6 (Talk to me | See what I have done) 18:01, 11 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you, 3family6. I'll have a look. FYO I have managed to create an article about her son Edgar Claxton. The boys are so much easier to do ... Storye book (talk) 18:28, 11 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

All the ideas about aiming for non-biased writing are good. Yet I'm very tired of the Wikipedia has a male-bias narrative that's become standard, which typically is to just state the same two statistics (the percentage of female editors and the percentage of female biography articles) and then just kind of expect the reader to nod as they take as granted that there's some massive conspiracy keeping women from being 50% of our editors and 50% of our biography articles. When the topic of gender bias comes up and people mention the "gender gap" and how "only 18%" of our articles are about women, it begs the question be asked, "What percentage should it be?" A kneejerk reaction might suggest 50%... but that can't be right since society HAS been severely biased against women, especially pre-1900 as this article states. Historically (and still currently in many places) women simply were expected to be more domestic which kept them from being in positions where they could do something encyclopedic. Given that that is true, it makes no sense to expect 50% of our articles to be about women. So what percentage should it be? I don't know but it's very possible that the current 20% is the current historically motivated value given that it is only in the last century women have been gaining the independence and freedom they deserve. This view, which is perfectly plausible and makes mathematical sense, has never been given proper consideration by the "Wikipedia is biased" folks. As for female editors, do we expect 50% there too? Again no. Many places in the world do not yet have equality for women and this will mean they are channeled into traditional roles. Our own surveys have found that women prioritize their time differently than men and this is a factor in the gender disparity. Some woman like the traditional housewife role that takes care of children and the house and leaves little time for editing. Others who stop editing said they viewed their career as a better way to spend their time than on Wikipedia compared men. Again, this is what our own surveys found. So 50% editorship is NOT expected either but something below 50%. What should it be? Again I don't know. These numbers are a result of social forces all over the world and we can't control society. We should focus on this things we CAN control. For example, Wikipedia and its sister projects should be inclusive and aggressively stamp out any editor being hostile to others based on gender. It should aim to educate readers (like this article is doing) about how to avoid bias they might not be aware they are propagating. The bottom line is that the fact that the percentages are both rising is good. But that might be less about us stamping out bias and more about us just tracking the trends of society. Jason Quinn (talk) 03:00, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
- @Jason Quinn: I'm very tired of the Wikipedia has a male-bias narrative So am I, and as soon as it's no longer true, we can all stop talking about it! Until then, it seems worth discussing. With all due respect to my fellow male Wikipedians and the fatigue that sets in for them whenever this topic comes up, I have to imagine that it's female Wikipedians who are really tired of Wikipedia's gender bias, so I would submit that as long as they're still willing to talk about it, we have an obligation to at least show up and listen. We don't actually have to say anything, if we're feeling tuckered out. It's totally acceptable for us to pipe down, and simply hear them. (In fact, perhaps that would even be the preferable approach.)
As for female editors, do we expect 50% there too? Oh, heck no! That's far too low. I'm with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who was fond of saying, when asked how many female Supreme Court justices would be "enough": "When there are nine, of course!" (As she correctly noted, we've tried a Court composed of nine men plenty of times...) And if say 70%, or 80%, or 100% of active Wikipedia editors in a given month were women, then perhaps we'd actually make some real progress on correcting the content gender imbalance that we're all so tired of. -- FeRDNYC (talk) 05:41, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
@FeRDNYC: and as soon as it's no longer true I just presented a counter argument that suggests that the bias may not exist, or at least exist to an extent far less than is typically suggested. Instead of thinking about it and considering it, you instead ignored it to maintain a preferred narrative. This is POV pushing. Jason Quinn (talk) 08:57, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
By that standard, how is it that whatever you're doing here doesn't constitute "POV pushing"? 207.161.86.162 (talk) 05:03, 1 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I think Jason that you are the one POV pushing here, and in fact, your response is a perfect example of the The "No-Problem" Problem. Having been involved in rescuing articles about female-related topics I easily recognize the types of bias that this essay explains. Jane (talk) 14:36, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@Jane023: Straight-hard fact: the Wikipedia-has-a-male-bias crowd has no defined objective for success. Worse, the editors claiming bias dodge and won't even properly address the issue. It's been this way for years. This is super important because the default (and zero thought) interpretation of success is 50% female editors and 50% female biographies. If we somehow magically managed to achieve those statistics tomorrow, the encyclopedia would have a huge female bias!! That is paradoxical-sounding at first, until you realize those numbers would mean there hasn't been any historical female bias. (Since it is contradictory to their own cause, this is the unsavory reason why editors don't want to define an objective.) Even if it's granted that bias exists in the encyclopedia, not one among you has ever even attempted to explain when and how they can detect if that bias has been effectively eliminated using those two statistics. In the absence of clearly-defined objectives, you have editors — as evidenced here — claiming I think seriously (despite it being semi-disguised as sarcasm as an easy out) that success might mean having a female majority editorship, perhaps even 100%. As for your edits, great. I am NOT saying non-neutral language doesn't exist on Wikipedia. If you see a way to improve an article, great. But discussing individual articles is pennies on the dollar. My focus is on the macroscopic level related to the two metrics that always seen to be used to "prove" bias. If somebody is claiming there is something wrong with our percentage of female editors and percentage of female biographies, they need to explain what they "should be" with a convincing argument. Otherwise it's not meaningful. Jason Quinn (talk) 04:12, 1 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Not a straight hard fact, but just your opinion. Like I said, perfect example of the "No-Problem" Problem. Jane (talk) 08:10, 1 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Good. If it's "just an opinion", then state it. What is the consensus objective with respect to those two statistics to measure successful elimination of bias? Waiting for answer. Jason Quinn (talk) 13:47, 1 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I was referring to your statements as opinion, and my opinion is that I agree with the article. In fact I took the picture of the blurb next to the painting by Rachel Ruysch. I suspect that the actual percentage of female editors on Wikipedia is even lower than the percentage of people willing to admit their female gender. However, there simply is no way to gather such statistics other than by interview or survey, and such means are few and far between anyway. My point about your comments being opinion is that you are just as unable to prove that your opinion is true. The idea that male bias is baked into most of academia is visible in the number of female professors, the number of female scholarship appointments, the number of awards to females in any academic discipline etc, and is not something that Wikipedia is able to change. By actively promoting women and working on the gap, Wikipedia can set an example that will hopefully find it's way back into academia. That said, it is also not clear what exactly drives women away from Wikipedia, or in any case fails to draw them in, but it is possibly the lack of sources that are interesting for women and which would enable them to produce articles with the same ease as men. Certainly I often find myself needing to create about five articles first in order to create the basis for one article about a missing women. This is because some major concept having to do with the woman's life is still missing. I think it would be great if more women contributed to Wikipedia, but sometimes I just wish more women would take an active part in reduce the gendergap in academia so that we would have more sources for articles about female-related aspects of everyday life, such as maternal death causes and prevention. We rarely consider Wikipedia being a matter of life and death, but we see more and more that people rely on Wikipedia as a source for information in their lives. Jane (talk) 18:04, 2 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Unlike the notorious RBG, the goal is to have roughly 50% of the volunteer editors be female, and to have topics of usually greater interest to women to be covered in as much depth as topics of usually greater interest to men. (Which is not quite the same thing as male and female biographies, though those are a fair indicator.) --GRuban (talk) 13:56, 2 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

As a side note, I can't believe I actually read this sentence in the year 2020: Some woman like the traditional housewife role that takes care of children and the house and leaves little time for editing. We really do still have a long, long way to go. -- FeRDNYC (talk) 05:46, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Well, some men are happily filling that role too. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 05:54, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@Davidwr: Oh, absolutely! Though I hope very few people of any gender adopt a role in the household that "leaves little time for editing" if they in fact want to edit, because what the hell are the other members of their household doing that they have comparatively greater amounts of free time available!? Clearly it's not pitching in and sharing the burden of responsibility at home. A relationship that leaves only one partner so overburdened that they have no time for themselves strikes me as a very unhealthy one! -- FeRDNYC (talk) 06:14, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Why would a "traditional housewife" role necessarily leave less time for editing than a "traditional money earner" role? --GRuban (talk) 21:53, 1 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Man works from sun to sun, but a woman's work is never done. E Eng 23:46, 1 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@FeRDNYC: We really do still have a long, long way to go. If you cannot accept common sense factual assertions without warping them into some statement to try to re-enforce a narrowly focused worldview, it is you who have a long way to go.... back to reality. As I stated, it was other things like jobs and family that our own survey found is the main reason women do not edit and stop editing Wikipedia. This is not my point of view, it was the point of view of women! You don't have to try to find chauvinism and injustice in everything. Look for truth instead. Jason Quinn (talk) 08:57, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for rerunning this, there's a lot of really good information here, and the more times we drill it into people the more hope we have of eventually seeing lasting improvements.

There are occasional glimmers of hope just in what's changed (usually in small ways) since the essay's 2015 authorship. For one, singular they has become much more widely and readily accepted/adopted. It appears all over popular media and in culture recently, typically with minimal reaction. There's less need to give it the speak-slowly-and-use-small-words treatment, the way this essay seems to. Clearly the text here was written anticipating fairly confused and/or skeptical reactions, at least from some editors. FeRDNYC (talk) 05:19, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I am responding to points raised above, as to whether bias against recognition of women's achievements may exist, or matter to any extent. I can only talk about the 19th century in the UK, because that is where I have done most research. Our bias about female achievement there is not based on verifiable evidence that women achieved less in those days, because there isn't such evidence. Women were achieving, but allowed men to take credit (or maybe men took credit anyway) because the market did not welcome work authored by women. Census enumerators usually did not write down wives' professions due to not asking, due to social expectations of men being the breadwinners and possibly women did not bother to tell them for similar reasons, yet often a woman's work was mentioned in documents elsewhere. For years I watched my late mother-in-law quietly doing the parish accounts in her home, although her less bright husband had been made parish council treasurer, and took all the credit. She went on to run a successful business which she started from scratch, proving her ability. That was of course a 20th century event, but the pattern would have been the same in the 19th. In the 19th century, women often could not sell their work directly, so they had to sell it through a male intermediary. Since all households needed income, there are no grounds for any assumption that women did not use their abilities to earn in that way. Our bias is of ignorance of what was really happening. The 19th-century novels referencing women's place in the home were written for a market which expected that as an ideal promoted by Anglican evangelicals (a different meaning from today's US evangelicals) but real women still had to earn. So please do not assume that 19th century British women did not achieve. They did, and some of it can be found out, if we only look for it. Storye book (talk) 10:29, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Finally a definitive set of instructions we can follow, or perhaps it already exists and I've not read it. scope_creep^Talk 14:40, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
There looks to be a gross error here. The ref at note 2 takes you to: 62 English 1767980 329746 18.65 - rank, language, all bios, female, %. This is around the figure I'm used to, and the 329746 is WAAAY higher than the 291,649 in the essay. I don't believe it was much different in March. The % looks ok though.[Actually this movement since March seems ok] As a long discussion at WiR showed, you can't understand gender ratios in WP BLPs without allowing for the massive distorting effect of the vast number of sports bios we have, the great majority male. Exclude all sports people, and the female BLP % is around 30%, which is not far away from the %s in many easily countable always-notable types of people, such as national elected politicians, heads of quoted businesses, fellows of national science academies etc etc. Johnbod (talk) 03:45, 1 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Johnbod, the female BLP percentage excluding sportspeople is a very interesting statistic. What is the source? Clayoquot (talk | contribs) 06:04, 1 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

It came from https://www.denelezh.org/gender-gap/ which currently seems to be dead. This is a page about the figures: A short history of Denelezh by Envel Le Hir. Possibly it has been merged into other figures now. User:Andrew Gray will probably know. The long discussion at WiR was Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Women_in_Red/Archive_67#Sports,_sports,_sports_(Jun-Jul_2019). Johnbod (talk) 16:48, 1 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@Johnbod and Clayoquot: I haven't had a chance to reassess these numbers since then - I really need to try and find the time to run some more analysis - but would agree that athletes, defined broadly, make up a disproportionately high share of our BLPs, and men make up a disproportionately high share of athletes. My numbers probably had an overly generous definition of "athlete" but it came to about 29% female for "all non-athlete BLPs".

Sadly, I'm not sure what happened to the denelezh data, which was really useful for getting a handle on this sort of question. I know there have been plans to replace it with a newer tool but not sure how far that's got. Andrew Gray (talk) 22:15, 4 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Heaps of thanks to SarahSV and co-editors of this excellent piece. Tony (talk) 08:14, 5 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I can't link to a photo because I can't see it in person (museum still closed due to lockdown) but there's a picture of the Rachel Ruysch flower painting being rehung in the Rijksmuseum honor gallery in recognition of International Women's Day. Two other notable paintings by women were hung there: Portrait of Moses by Gesina ter Borch and the Jolly Drinker by Judith Leyster. It's about time! Maybe this essay helped? Who knows. Jane (talk) 13:30, 8 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

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