Wikipedia’s gender gap has flipped for one group of scientists

From ScienceMag:

Women have long been underrepresented in science—and on Wikipedia. But one corner of academia may have quietly reversed part of that trend. Among biology faculty at top U.S. research universities, women are now more likely than men to have Wikipedia biographies, according to a paper published today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The latest data likely reflect, at least in part, the work of organized editing campaigns aiming to include more women on the website.

“It definitely speaks to all of the amazing crowdsourcing and outreach that’s come out of our community around the gender gap,” says Kelly Doyle Kim, who studies Wikipedia’s gender gap at the Wiki Education Foundation and was not involved with the work. She says she was surprised by the findings, particularly because previous studies in other STEM fields found women academics were less likely to appear on Wikipedia than men with similar publication records.

The study authors were also surprised. “I thought that women were going to be underrepresented,” says David Alvarez-Ponce, an evolutionary genomicist at the University of Nevada, Reno and co-author of the study. “But it turns out that we found the opposite.”

Alvarez-Ponce and his colleague embarked on the study after seeing the news 2 years ago that women had finally reached 20% of biography subjects on the English-language Wikipedia, a number editors and volunteers had spent years trying to raise. The scientists wondered whether the statistic held true for women in their field, too. They manually searched for Wikipedia entries for all 5825 tenure-track and tenured faculty who were affiliated with biology departments at 146 universities as of 2024, collecting data including page length, number of edits, and annual page views. The gender of the faculty members was surmised using listed pronouns or photographs.

The team found that 9.4% of women in the data set had Wikipedia biographies, compared with 7.5% of men. The gap widened among more senior faculty—women who are full professors were almost 7% more likely than men who are full professors to appear on the site.

These trends are recent, though. By analyzing when the Wikipedia pages were created, the team found that men biologists were more likely to have biographies until 2018. Between 2019 and 2021, women and men had similar chances. Then, in 2022 the pattern reversed and women were more likely to have a Wikipedia page than men.

The researchers suspect that organized editing campaigns likely helped drive the shift. Nearly half of the women’s biographies created since 2015 were written by editors affiliated with Women in Red, a volunteer effort aimed at addressing Wikipedia’s gender imbalance.

The new study also found that women’s biographies tended to be longer than men’s, even after normalizing for publication output and career stage. But women’s pages were viewed and edited at similar rates to men’s pages once those factors were taken into account.

The findings don’t mean broader inequities in academia have been solved, Alvarez-Ponce cautions. Women remain underrepresented in senior STEM positions and often face barriers in funding, recognition, and promotion. Plus, these results for the field of biology may not extend to other disciplines.

Still, he says, “Wikipedia is a very important source of information for many people across the world, especially young people. It’s a way in which people can be exposed to role models.” For researchers interested in representation, he adds, the platform offers something rare: a massive, publicly accessible record of whom society chooses to document and whom it overlooks.

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