Gender bias on Wikipedia

Gender bias on Wikipedia is the phenomenon that men are more likely than women to be volunteer contributors and article subjects of Wikipedia, as well as the lesser coverage on Wikipedia of topics primarily of interest to women.
In a 2018 survey covering 12 language versions of Wikipedia and some other Wikimedia Foundation projects, 90% of 3,734 respondents reported their gender as male, 8.8% as female, and 1% as other; among contributors to the English Wikipedia, 84.7% identified as male, 13.6% as female, and 1.7% as other. In 2019, Katherine Maher, then CEO of Wikimedia Foundation, said her team's working assumption was that women make up 15–20% of total contributors.
A 2021 study found that, in April 2017, 41% of biographies nominated for deletion were women despite only 17% of published biographies being women. The visibility and reachability of women on Wikipedia is limited, with a 2015 report finding that female pages generally "tend to be more linked to men". Language that is considered sexist, loaded, or otherwise gendered has been identified in articles about women. Gender bias features among the most frequent criticisms of Wikipedia, sometimes as part of a more general criticism about systemic bias in Wikipedia.
In 2015, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales announced that the encyclopedia had failed to reach its goal to retain 25% female editorship. Programs such as edit-a-thons and Women in Red have been developed to encourage female editors and increase the coverage of women's topics.

Gender bias in participation

Efforts to measure gender disparity

The first study of world-wide presence in 2008 found that 13% of all editors were female, which, after a follow-up study in 2011, was reduced to 9% globally. In the United States, especially within the English Wikipedia, a 2015 study found that 15% of contributors were women.
In 2009, a Wikimedia Foundation survey revealed that 6% of editors who made more than 500 edits were female, with the average male editor having twice as many edits.

Variable	Readers US	Readers US	Editors US	Editors US adj.	Editors	Editors adj.
Female	49.0	39.9	17.8	22.7	12.7	16.1
Married	60.1	44.1	30.9	36.3	33.2	38.4
Children	36.0	29.4	16.4	27.6	14.4	25.3
Immigrant	10.1	14.4	12.1	9.8	8.2	7.4
Student	17.7	29.9	46.0	38.5	47.7	40.3

In 2010, United Nations University and UNU-MERIT jointly presented an overview of the results of a global Wikipedia survey. A New York Times article cited this Wikimedia Foundation collaboration, which indicated that fewer than 13% of contributors to Wikipedia are women. Sue Gardner, then executive director of the foundation, said that increasing diversity was about making the encyclopedia "as good as it could be". Factors the article cited as possibly discouraging women from editing included the "obsessive fact-loving realm", associations with the "hard-driving hacker crowd", and the necessity to be "open to very difficult, high-conflict people, even misogynists". In 2013, the results of the survey were adjusted for non-response bias by Hill and Shaw using a propensity score estimation technique to suggest upward corrections to the data from the survey and to recommend updates to the statistics being surveyed, giving 22.7% for adult US female editors and 16.1% for all US female editors.
In February 2011, The New York Times followed up with a series of opinions on the subject under the banner, "Where Are the Women in Wikipedia?" Susan C. Herring, a professor of information science and linguistics, said that she was not surprised by the Wikipedia contributors' gender gap. She said that the often contentious nature of Wikipedia article "talk" pages, where article content is discussed, is unappealing to many women, "if not outright intimidating". Joseph M. Reagle reacted similarly, saying that the combination of a "culture of hacker elitism", combined with the disproportionate effect of high-conflict members on the community atmosphere, can make it unappealing. He said, "the ideology and rhetoric of freedom and openness can then be used to suppress concerns about inappropriate or offensive speech as 'censorship' and to rationalize low female participation as simply a matter of their personal preference and choice." Justine Cassell said that although women are as knowledgeable as men, and as able to defend their point of view, "it is still the case in American society that debate, contention, and vigorous defense of one's position is often still seen as a male stance, and women's use of these speech styles can call forth negative evaluations."
In April 2011, the Wikimedia Foundation conducted its first semi-annual Wikipedia survey. It suggested that 9% of Wikipedia editors are women. It also reported, "Contrary to the perception of some, our data shows that very few women editors feel like they have been harassed, and very few feel Wikipedia is a sexualized environment." However, an October 2011 paper at the International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration found evidence that suggested that Wikipedia may have "a culture that may be resistant to female participation."
A study published in 2014 found that there is also an "Internet skills gap" with regard to Wikipedia editors. The authors found that the most likely Wikipedia contributors are high-skilled men and that there is no gender gap among low-skilled editors, and concluded that the "skills gap" exacerbates the gender gap among editors. During 2010–14, women made up 61% of participants of the college courses arranged by the Wiki Education Foundation program that included editing Wikipedia as part of the curriculum. Their contributions were found to shift the Wikipedia content from pop-culture and STEM towards social sciences and humanities.
In 2015, Katherine Maher, Gardner's successor as the director of the Wikimedia Foundation, argued that Wikipedia's gender bias "reflects society as a whole". For example, she noted that Wikipedia is dependent on secondary sources which have similar biases. She agreed that Wikipedia's editing process introduces biases of its own, especially as topics that are popular among its predominantly male editors draw more edits.
A 2017 study found that women participating in an experiment by editing a Wikipedia-like site tended to view other editors as male, and to view their responses as more critical than if the other editor was gender-neutral. The study concluded that:
A 2017 study by Heather Ford and Judy Wajcman observes that research on the gender bias continues to frame the problem as a deficit in women. In contrast, their central argument states that infrastructure studies in feminist technoscience allows the gender analysis to be taken to a further level. It looks at three issues within the infrastructure: content policies, software, and the legalistic framework of operation. It suggests that progress can be made through altering that culture of knowledge production through encouraging alternate knowledge, reducing the technical barriers to editing, and addressing the complexity of Wikipedia policies.
In their February 2018 article, "Pipeline of Online Participation Inequalities: The Case of Wikipedia Editing", Shaw and Hargittai concluded from their studies that solving the problems of participation inequality including gender bias requires a broader focus on subjects other than inequality. They recommended a focus on encouraging participants of all educational backgrounds, skill levels, and age groups to help Wikipedia to improve. They recommended further that informing more women that Wikipedia is free to edit and open to everyone is critical in eliminating gender bias.
In March 2018, mathematician Marie A. Vitulli wrote in Notices of the American Mathematical Society, "The percentage of women editors on Wikipedia remains dismally low."
In 2014, Noopur Raval, a PhD candidate at UC Irvine, wrote in "The Encyclopedia Must Fail!– Notes on Queering Wikipedia" that "making a platform open access does not automatically translate to equality of participation, ease of access, or cultural acceptance of the medium." In 2017, researchers Matthew A. Vetter and Keon Mandell Pettiway said that the white, cis-gendered male dominance among Wikipedia editors has led to the "erasure of non-normative gender and sexual identities", in addition to cis-gendered females, and that the "androcentric and heteronormative discourses" of Wikipedia editing insufficiently allow "marginalized gender and sexual identities to take part in language use and the construction of knowledge."

Causes

Collier and Bear's research suggests that the difference in contribution rates could be due to three factors: the high levels of conflict in discussions, dislike of critical environments, and lack of confidence in editing other contributors' work. A published scoping review on the gender gap in Wikipedia found three main categories for these factors in academic literature: 'women problem', 'mirror effect', and 'systemic problem'.
The New York Times pointed out that Wikipedia's female participation rate may be in line with other "public thought-leadership forums". A 2010 study revealed a Wikipedia female participation rate of 13 percent, observed to be close to the 15 percent overall female participation rate of other "public thought-leadership forums". Wikipedia research fellow Sarah Stierch acknowledged that it is "fairly common" for Wikipedia contributors to remain gender-anonymous. A perceived unwelcoming culture and tolerance of violent and abusive language are also reasons put forth for the gender gap. According to a 2013 study, another cause of the gender gap in Wikipedia is the failure to attract and retain female editors, resulting in a negative impact on Wikipedia's coverage. As well, Wikipedia "...editors that publicly identify as women face harassment" from other Wikipedia editors.
Former Wikimedia Foundation executive director Sue Gardner cited nine reasons why women do not edit Wikipedia, culled from comments by female Wikipedia editors:

A lack of user-friendliness in the editing interface.
Not having enough free time.
A lack of self-confidence.
Aversion to conflict and an unwillingness to participate in lengthy edit wars.
Belief that their contributions are too likely to be reverted or deleted.
Some find its overall atmosphere misogynistic.
Wikipedia culture is sexual in ways they find off-putting.
Being addressed as male is off-putting to women whose primary language has grammatical gender.
Fewer opportunities for social relationships and a welcoming tone compared to other sites.

Though the proportion of female readership to male readership on Wikipedia is roughly equal, women are less likely to convert themselves to editors. Several studies suggest that there may be a formed culture in Wikipedia that discourages women from participating. Lam et al. link this culture to 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, an increased likelihood that edits by new female editors are reverted, and/or that articles with high proportions of female editors are more contentious.
The issue has also been connected with broader societal views on what records and information should be. Since Wikipedia has an expectation of "professionalism", authors Joan Schwartz and Terry Cook say that the standards of the professional are often created by the standards of what dominant political groups find comfortable, and affect women and people of color much more than they do men. Disputes about institutional power are often worth discussing when determining whether a submission should be disputed or not.
In 2019, Schlomit Aharoni Lir described "the vicious circle" model, displaying how the five layers of negative reputation, anonymity, fear, alienation and rejection – enhance each other, in a manner that deters women from contributing to the website. In order for more women to join Wikipedia, the researcher offers the implantation of a "Virtuous Circle" that consists of nonymity, connection to social media, inclusionist policy, soft deletion and red-flagging harassments.
In Wikimedia's Gender Equity Report in 2018, 14% of interviewees identified poor community health as a significant challenge in being an editor on Wikipedia. In the study, community health was defined as harassment, a general lack of support for gender equity work and a lack of diversity in leadership.
After reviewing testimonies that ranged from microaggressions to direct attacks, the Wikipedia Board of Trustees voted in May 2020 to adopt a more formal moderation process to fight against harassment and to uphold Wikipedia's community standards. The foundation has been tasked to finish the draft of this plan by the end of 2020, and it will include banning users who participate in gender harassment, providing support and communities for all gender identities, putting more resources into the Trust and Safety Team, and more.
Collier and Bear in 2012 summarized the reason for working barriers of women in Wikipedia in three words: conflict, criticism and confidence. The authors suggested that "If a community tolerates a culture of conflict that males perceived to be simply 'competitive' or witty and sarcastic they are likely to find themselves losing the many benefits female contributors can bring to the table". Criticism refers to women's unwillingness to edit someone else's work and to let their work be edited by someone else; confidence shows that women are often not too confident about their own expertise and ability in editing and contributing to a certain work. Wikipedia's free to edit policy gives users an open platform, but researchers have suggested that its competitive and critical environment can limit women's incentives to participate.
Through examining the power infrastructure of Wikipedia, Ford and Wajcman pointed out another cause that may reinforce Wikipedia's gender bias. Editing on Wikipedia requires "particular forms of sociotechnical expertise and authority that constitute the knowledge or epistemological infrastructure of Wikipedia". People who are equipped with this expertise and skill are considered more likely to reach positions with power in Wikipedia. These are proposed to be predominantly men. Further, in examining Wikipedia's detailed policy system, the researchers conclude that its complexity and legal underpinnings grant some users substantial influence in content debates. This dominance can marginalize those not versed in these details, particularly deterring women and new participants.
Studies have also considered the gender bias in Wikipedia from a historical perspective. Konieczny and Klein indicated that Wikipedia is just a part of our biased society which has a long history of gender inequality. As Wikipedia records daily activities by individual editors, it serves as both "a reflection of the world" and "a tool used to produce our world".
An example of a direct account of gender bias comes from Wikipedia user Lightbreather, where she recounts having pornographic images linked to her username as a way to discredit her Wikipedia contributions.
Harassment, however, also exists for LGBT people. Those who identify as being part of the community are typically subjected to harassment if their identities are made public. For example, an administrator on a Wikipedia page blocked an editor, merely because the person's username implied they were a part of the LGBT community.