
Gender bias on Wikipedia is the phenomenon that men are more likely than women to be
volunteer contributors and article subjects of
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a free content, free Online content, online encyclopedia that is written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and the wiki software MediaWiki. Founded by Jimmy Wales and La ...
(although the
English Wikipedia
The English Wikipedia is the primary English-language edition of Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia. It was created by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger on 15 January 2001, as Wikipedia's first edition.
English Wikipedia is hosted alongside o ...
has almost 400,000 encyclopedic biographies about women, men have about four times as many), 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
The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. (WMF) is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California, and registered there as foundation (United States law), a charitable foundation. It is the host of Wikipedia, th ...
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
The English Wikipedia is the primary English-language edition of Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia. It was created by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger on 15 January 2001, as Wikipedia's first edition.
English Wikipedia is hosted alongside o ...
, 84.7% identified as male, 13.6% as female, and 1.7% as other (total of 88 respondents). In 2019,
Katherine Maher, then
CEO
A chief executive officer (CEO), also known as a chief executive or managing director, is the top-ranking corporate officer charged with the management of an organization, usually a company or a nonprofit organization.
CEOs find roles in variou ...
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
Jimmy Donal Wales (born August 7, 1966), also known as Jimbo Wales, is an American List of Internet entrepreneurs, Internet entrepreneur and former Trader (finance), financial trader. He is a Founders of Wikipedia, co-founder of the non-profi ...
announced that the encyclopedia had failed to reach its goal to retain 25% female editorship.
Programs such as
edit-a-thon
An edit-a-thon (sometimes written editathon) is an event where some editors of online communities such as Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap (also known as a " mapathon"), and LocalWiki edit and improve a specific topic or type of content. The events typ ...
s 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
The English Wikipedia is the primary English-language edition of Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia. It was created by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger on 15 January 2001, as Wikipedia's first edition.
English Wikipedia is hosted alongside o ...
, 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.
In 2010,
United Nations University
The is the think tank and academic arm of the United Nations. Headquartered in Shibuya, Tokyo, Japan, with diplomatic status as a UN institution, its mission is to help resolve list of global issues, global issues related to Human development ...
and
UNU-MERIT jointly presented an overview of the results of a global Wikipedia survey.
A ''New York Times'' article cited this
Wikimedia Foundation
The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. (WMF) is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California, and registered there as foundation (United States law), a charitable foundation. It is the host of Wikipedia, th ...
collaboration, which indicated that fewer than 13% of contributors to Wikipedia are women.
Sue Gardner
Sue Gardner (born May 11, 1967) is a Canadian journalist, not-for-profit executive and business executive. She was the executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation from December 2007 until May 2014, and before that was the director of the C ...
, 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% (17.8% unadjusted) for adult US female editors and 16.1% (12.7% unadjusted) for all US female editors.
In February 2011, ''
The New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''NYT'') is an American daily newspaper based in New York City. ''The New York Times'' covers domestic, national, and international news, and publishes opinion pieces, investigative reports, and reviews. As one of ...
'' 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 (a minority) on the community atmosphere, can make it unappealing. He said, "the ideology and rhetoric of freedom and openness can then be used (a) to suppress concerns about inappropriate or offensive speech as 'censorship' and (b) 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
Stem or STEM most commonly refers to:
* Plant stem, a structural axis of a vascular plant
* Stem group
* Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics
Stem or STEM can also refer to:
Language and writing
* Word stem, part of a word respon ...
towards social sciences and humanities.
In 2015,
Katherine Maher, Gardner's successor as the director of the
Wikimedia Foundation
The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. (WMF) is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California, and registered there as foundation (United States law), a charitable foundation. It is the host of Wikipedia, th ...
, argued that Wikipedia's gender bias "reflects society as a whole". For example, she noted that Wikipedia is dependent on
s 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
Heather Ford is a South African people, South African researcher, blogger, journalist, social entrepreneur and Open-source model, open source activist who has worked in the field of Internet policy, law and management in South Africa, the Unite ...
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 will 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
''Notices of the American Mathematical Society'' is the membership journal of the American Mathematical Society (AMS), published monthly except for the combined June/July issue. The first volume was published in 1953. Each issue of the magazine ...
'', "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 explain 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. 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

Some gender research literature suggests that the difference in contribution rates could be due to three factors: (1) the high levels of conflict in discussions, (2) dislike of critical environments, and (3) lack of confidence in editing other contributors' work.
[Statistics based on Wikimedia Foundation Wikipedia editor survey]
2011
(Nov. 2010-April 2011) an
November 2011
(April – October 2011) A published
scoping review on the gender gap in Wikipedia found three main categories for these factors in academic literature: ‘women problem’ (blaming female characteristics), ‘mirror effect’ (blaming society but excusing Wikipedia), and ‘systemic problem’ (blaming the original male-dominated editor community).
''
The New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''NYT'') is an American daily newspaper based in New York City. ''The New York Times'' covers domestic, national, and international news, and publishes opinion pieces, investigative reports, and reviews. As one of ...
'' 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
Sue Gardner (born May 11, 1967) is a Canadian journalist, not-for-profit executive and business executive. She was the executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation from December 2007 until May 2014, and before that was the director of the C ...
cited nine reasons why women do not edit Wikipedia, culled from comments by female
Wikipedia editors:
# A lack of
user-friendliness
Usability can be described as the capacity of a system to provide a condition for its users to perform the tasks safely, effectively, and efficiently while enjoying the experience. In software engineering, usability is the degree to which a softw ...
in the
editing interface.
# Not having enough
free time.
# A lack of
self-confidence
Confidence is the feeling of belief or trust that a person or thing is reliable.
*
*
* Self-confidence is trust in oneself. Self-confidence involves a positive belief that one can generally accomplish what one wishes to do in the future. Sel ...
.
#
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
Misogyny () is hatred of, contempt for, or prejudice against women or girls. It is a form of sexism that can keep women at a lower social status than men, thus maintaining the social roles of patriarchy. Misogyny has been widely practis ...
.
# 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
In linguistics, a grammatical gender system is a specific form of a noun class system, where nouns are assigned to gender categories that are often not related to the real-world qualities of the entities denoted by those nouns. In languages wit ...
.
# 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 (47%), women are less likely to convert themselves to editors (16%). Several studies suggest that there may be a formed
culture
Culture ( ) is a concept that encompasses the social behavior, institutions, and Social norm, norms found in human societies, as well as the knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, Social norm, customs, capabilities, Attitude (psychology), attitudes ...
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.
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
Community health refers to non-treatment based health services that are delivered outside Hospital, hospitals and Clinic, clinics. Community health is a subset of public health that is taught to and practiced by Clinician, clinicians as part of th ...
as a significant challenge in being an editor on Wikipedia. In the study, community health was defined as
harassment
Harassment covers a wide range of behaviors of an offensive nature. It is commonly understood as behavior that demeans, humiliates, and intimidates a person, and it is characteristically identified by its unlikelihood in terms of social and ...
, 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
Sociotechnical systems (STS) in organizational development is an approach to complex organizational work design that recognizes the interaction between people and technology in wiktionary:Workplace, workplaces. The term also refers to coherent sys ...
expertise and authority that constitute the knowledge or
epistemological
Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that examines the nature, origin, and limits of knowledge. Also called "the theory of knowledge", it explores different types of knowledge, such as propositional knowledge about facts, practical knowled ...
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
Gender inequality is the social phenomenon in which people are not treated equally on the basis of gender. This inequality can be caused by gender discrimination or sexism. The treatment may arise from distinctions regarding biology, psychology ...
.
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
LGBTQ people are individuals who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, or questioning. Many variants of the initialism are used; LGBTQIA+ people incorporates intersex, asexual, aromantic, agender, and other individuals. The gro ...
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.
Gender bias in content
In 2016, Wagner et al.
found that gender inequality manifests itself in Wikipedia's biographical content in multiple ways, including unequal thresholds for including an article on the person, topical bias, linguistic bias, and structural inequalities. The authors found that women with biographies on Wikipedia are slightly more notable than men on Wikipedia, and proposed three possible explanations for future research: 1) that editors are more likely to write about their own gender, 2) that men are more likely to create articles about themselves, and 3) that external sources make women less visible.
As for topical bias, biographies about women tend to focus more on family-, gender-, and relationship-related topics. This is especially true for biographies of women born before 1900. The authors also found structural differences in terms of meta-data and hyperlinks, which have consequences for information-seeking activities.
Article creation and deletion
Of the 1,960,452 biographical articles on the English Wikipedia in September 2023, only 385,236 or 19.65% were about women.
[ 2021 figures]
In the English Wikipedia and five other language editions that were studied by researchers, the ratio of articles about women to articles about men was higher than in three other databases. However, analysis with
computational linguistics
Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field concerned with the computational modelling of natural language, as well as the study of appropriate computational approaches to linguistic questions. In general, computational linguistics ...
concluded that the way women and men are described in articles demonstrates bias, with articles about women more likely to use more words relating to gender and family. The researchers believe that this is a sign Wikipedia editors consider male the "null gender" (in other words, that "male" is assumed unless otherwise specified, an example of
male as norm). Another critique of Wikipedia's approach, from a 2014 ''
Guardian'' editorial, is that it has difficulty making judgments about "what matters". To illustrate this point they noted that the page
listing pornographic actresses was better organized than the page
listing women writers.
[''The Guardian'', 2014, (London)]
"The Guardian view on Wikipedia: evolving truth"
The ''
International Journal of Communication
The ''International Journal of Communication'' is an open access peer-reviewed academic journal covering studies on communication. The founding editor-in-chief was Larry Gross (USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism) and it is publi ...
'' published research by Reagle and Lauren Rhue that examined the coverage, gender representation, and article length of thousands of biographical subjects on the English-language Wikipedia and the online ''Encyclopædia Britannica'' (as at June 2010). They concluded that Wikipedia provided better coverage and longer articles in general, that Wikipedia typically has more articles on women than ''Britannica'' in absolute terms, but Wikipedia articles on women were more likely to be missing than articles on men relative to ''Britannica''. That is, Wikipedia dominated ''Britannica'' in biographical coverage, but more so when it comes to men. Similarly, one might say that ''Britannica'' is more balanced in whom it neglects to cover than Wikipedia. For both reference works, article length did not consistently differ by gender.
A 2023 study using Wikidata to measure content found that ''Britannica'', which covers 50,479 biographies, has 5,999 of them about women, about 11.88%. The study compared the figure to the 18.22% of biographies across Wikimedia projects that were of women, citing 2021 data.
A 2011 study by researchers from the
University of Minnesota
The University of Minnesota Twin Cities (historically known as University of Minnesota) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul, Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint ...
and three other universities found that articles edited by women, "which presumably were more likely to be of interest to women", were "significantly shorter" on average than those worked on by men or by both men and women.
According to a 2021 study by sociologist Francesca Tripodi, biographies on Wikipedia about women are disproportionately nominated for deletion as non-notable. In October 2018, when
Donna Strickland won a
Nobel Prize in Physics
The Nobel Prize in Physics () is an annual award given by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for those who have made the most outstanding contributions to mankind in the field of physics. It is one of the five Nobel Prizes established by the ...
, numerous write-ups mentioned that she did not previously have a Wikipedia page. A draft had been submitted, but was rejected for not demonstrating "significant coverage (not just passing mentions) about the subject". A 2024 study by Khandaker Tasnim Huq and Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia on English speaking Wikipedia additionally showed that deletion nominations happen 34% faster after the creation of women biographies than after the creation of men biographies.
In July 2006,
Stacy Schiff
Stacy Madeleine Schiff (born October 26, 1961) is an American essayist. Her biography of Véra Nabokov won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize in biography. Schiff has also written biographies of French aviator and author of '' The Little Prince'', Antoine ...
wrote a ''New Yorker'' essay about Wikipedia entitled "Know It All". The Wikipedia article about her was created the very same day. According to
Timothy Noah
Timothy Robert Noah (born 1958) is an American journalist, author, and a staff writer at ''The New Republic''. Previously he was labor policy editor for ''Politico'', a contributing writer at MSNBC.com, a senior editor of ''The New Republic'' ass ...
, she was apparently not notable by Wikipedia standards, despite the
Guggenheim fellowship
Guggenheim Fellowships are Grant (money), grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, endowed by the late Simon Guggenheim, Simon and Olga Hirsh Guggenheim. These awards are bestowed upon indiv ...
and
Pulitzer Prize
The Pulitzer Prizes () are 23 annual awards given by Columbia University in New York City for achievements in the United States in "journalism, arts and letters". They were established in 1917 by the will of Joseph Pulitzer, who had made his fo ...
many years previous. Her essay and the article about her are now featured in the Wikiproject to counter systemic bias.
Article visibility
A 2016 study led by Claudia Wagner showed that biographies of women on Wikipedia in English are less visible than biographies of men and concluded that this difference is partly due to the fact that the community links articles about men better together.
In 2023, a study conducted by Akhil Arora, Robert West and Martin Gerlach showed that biographies of women are over-represented among orphan articles (articles that cannot be accessed via other articles): in English Wikipedia, women represent 19% of the biographies, but also represent 29% of orphan biographies.
Furthermore, the study shows that orphan articles are less visible than the others.
Article content
While most attention falls on the gap between biographies of men and women on Wikipedia, some research also focuses on linguistics and differences in topics covered.
In 2020, the
Association for Computational Linguistics
The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is a scientific and professional organization for people working on natural language processing. Its namesake conference is one of the primary high impact conferences for natural language proce ...
performed a
textual analysis
Content analysis is the study of documents and communication artifacts, known as texts e.g. photos, speeches or essays. Social scientists use content analysis to examine patterns in communication in a replicable and systematic manner. One of the ...
of gender biases within Wikipedia articles. The study found that articles about women contain more gender-specific phrases such as "female scientist" while men are referenced using more gender-neutral terms such as "scientist". The study concluded that overall gender bias is decreasing for science and family oriented articles, while increasing for artistic and creative content.
A 2015 study found that, on the English Wikipedia, the word "divorced" appears more than four times as often in biographical articles about women than men. According to the Wikimedia Foundation, "We don't fully know why, but it's likely a multitude of factors, including the widespread tendency throughout history to describe the lives of women through their relationships with men".
A 2020 study of the coverage of Fortune 1000 CEOs found a gender bias in favour of women. The study investigated contributions from brand-new versus more established editors and found that new editors are more likely to introduce information biased against women, but that established users tend to overcompensate when reacting to these edits. Articles written by a more diverse group of new and established editors were found to be most neutral.
Gender bias harassment also goes beyond those who identify as
cisgender
The word ''cisgender'' (often shortened to ''cis''; sometimes ''cissexual'') describes a person whose gender identity corresponds to their sex assigned at birth, i.e., someone who is not ''transgender''. The prefix '' cis-'' is Latin and ...
on Wikipedia. For example, when celebrities
come out as
transgender
A transgender (often shortened to trans) person has a gender identity different from that typically associated with the sex they were sex assignment, assigned at birth.
The opposite of ''transgender'' is ''cisgender'', which describes perso ...
, they are commonly subjected to discrimination and their pronouns are then put up for debate. Notable examples of these debates include
Chelsea Manning
Chelsea Elizabeth Manning (born Bradley Edward Manning, December 17, 1987) is an American activist and whistleblower. She is a former United States Army soldier who was convicted by court-martial in July 2013 of violations of the Espionage ...
in 2013 and
Caitlyn Jenner in 2015, when their self-declared pronouns were vandalized and reverted to their previous pronouns.
A 2021 study found that articles about
transgender women and
non-binary people
Non-binary or genderqueer gender identities are those that are outside the male/female gender binary. Non-binary identities often fall under the transgender umbrella since non-binary people typically identify with a gender that is differ ...
tend to have a higher percentage of their article devoted to the "Personal Life" section, which often focuses on the person's gender identity: "The implication that gender identity is a noteworthy trait for just these groups is possibly indicative of 'othering', where individuals are distinguished or labeled as not fitting a societal norm, which often occurs in the context of gender or sexual orientation".
In 2022 study, it was found that scholarly articles by men are more likely to be cited than those by women. Furthermore, publications with women as the main authors are significantly less likely to be referenced on Wikipedia. An explanation for this offered by the authors is
homophily
Homophily () is a concept in sociology describing the tendency of individuals to associate and bond with similar others, as in the proverb "". The presence of homophily has been discovered in a vast array of network studies: over have observe ...
, which is the idea that people prefer other people or work similar to their own. This may explain the citation bias as Wikipedia editors are mainly male, so they may prefer publications by men.
Reactions
Wikipedia has been criticized by some academics and journalists for having primarily male contributors,
and for having fewer and less extensive articles about women or topics important to women.
Writing for ''
Slate
Slate is a fine-grained, foliated, homogeneous, metamorphic rock derived from an original shale-type sedimentary rock composed of clay or volcanic ash through low-grade, regional metamorphism. It is the finest-grained foliated metamorphic ro ...
'' in 2011, conservative political commentator
Heather Mac Donald called Wikipedia's gender imbalance a "non-problem in search of a misguided solution". Mac Donald asserted, "The most straightforward explanation for the differing rates of participation in Wikipedia—and the one that conforms to everyday experience—is that, on average, males and females have different interests and preferred ways of spending their free time".
In August 2014, Wikipedia co-founder
Jimmy Wales
Jimmy Donal Wales (born August 7, 1966), also known as Jimbo Wales, is an American List of Internet entrepreneurs, Internet entrepreneur and former Trader (finance), financial trader. He is a Founders of Wikipedia, co-founder of the non-profi ...
announced in a BBC interview the
Wikimedia Foundation
The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. (WMF) is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California, and registered there as foundation (United States law), a charitable foundation. It is the host of Wikipedia, th ...
's plans for "doubling down" on the gender content gap at Wikipedia. Wales said the Foundation would be open to more outreach and more software changes.
[Wikipedia 'completely failed' to fix gender imbalance](_blank)
, BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is a British public service broadcaster headquartered at Broadcasting House in London, England. Originally established in 1922 as the British Broadcasting Company, it evolved into its current sta ...
interview with Jimmy Wales
Jimmy Donal Wales (born August 7, 1966), also known as Jimbo Wales, is an American List of Internet entrepreneurs, Internet entrepreneur and former Trader (finance), financial trader. He is a Founders of Wikipedia, co-founder of the non-profi ...
, 8 August 2014; starting at 45 seconds.
In ''
Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men'',
Caroline Criado Perez notes that many Wikipedia pages that refer to men's teams or occupations are listed as gender neutral (
England national football team
The England national football team have represented England in international Association football, football since the first international match in 1872. It is controlled by the Football Association (FA), the governing body for football in Eng ...
), while pages for similar teams or occupations for women are specifically gendered (
England women's national football team
The England women's national football team, nicknamed the Lionesses, has been governed by the Football Association (FA) since 1993, having been previously administered by the Women's Football Association (WFA). England played its first interna ...
).
In 2022, Wikipedia was seen as "reflecting the biases of its community editors."
In 2025,
Núria Ferran-Ferrer, Associate Professor and Rector's Delegate for the Direction of the Equality Unit of
Universitat de Barcelona
The University of Barcelona (official name in ; UB), formerly also known as Central University of Barcelona (), is a public university, public research university located in the city of Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain. It was established in 1450. Wi ...
(UB), called gender bias on Wikipedia is "systemic" and "over a decade", combining research to explain
why such bias happened. Ferran-Ferrer proposed some effects to address the issue: more female editors, contributors' general diversity, better coverage of women in mainstream media, more accessible editorial guidelines, and a welcoming and encouraging culture for new editors.
Efforts to address gender bias
Wikimedia Foundation
The
Wikimedia Foundation
The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. (WMF) is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California, and registered there as foundation (United States law), a charitable foundation. It is the host of Wikipedia, th ...
has officially held the stance, since at least 2011 when Gardner was executive director, that gender bias exists in the project. It has made some attempts to address it but Gardner has expressed frustration with the degree of success achieved. She has also noted that "in the very limited leisure time women had, they tended to be more involved in social activities instead of editing Wikipedia. 'Women see technology more as a tool they use to accomplish tasks, rather than something fun in itself.
In 2011, the Foundation set a target of having 25 percent of its contributors identifying as female by 2015.
In August 2013, Gardner said, "I didn't solve it. We didn't solve it. The Wikimedia Foundation didn't solve it. The solution won't come from the Wikimedia Foundation."
In 2017,
Wikimedia Foundation
The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. (WMF) is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California, and registered there as foundation (United States law), a charitable foundation. It is the host of Wikipedia, th ...
put a funding of $500,000 in building a more encouraging environment for diversity on Wikipedia.
VisualEditor
VisualEditor (VE) is an online rich-text editor for MediaWiki-powered wikis that provides a way to edit pages based on the "what you see is what you get" principle. It was developed by the Wikimedia Foundation in partnership with Fandom. In ...
, a project funded by the Wikimedia Foundation that allows for
WYSIWYG
In computing, WYSIWYG ( ), an acronym for what you see is what you get, refers to software that allows content to be edited in a form that resembles its appearance when printed or displayed as a finished product, such as a printed document, web ...
-style editing on Wikipedia, is said to be aimed in part at closing the gender gap.
Thanks to a Wikimedia Foundation grant, in March 2021 an alpha version of Humaniki was released, providing a wide variety of gender gap statistics based on
Wikidata
Wikidata is a collaboratively edited multilingual knowledge graph hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation. It is a common source of open data that Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia, and anyone else, are able to use under the CC0 public domain ...
. The stats are automatically updated as new information is made available.
In 2024, Wikimedia Research Fund funded a one-year project called "
Cover Women". It analyses how women and marginalised groups are shown on Wikipedia's
main page
Welcome to Wikipedia,
the free content, free encyclopedia that Help:Introduction to Wikipedia, anyone can edit.
Special:Statistics, active editors Special:Statistics, articles in English language, English
Did you know ...
In the ...
.
User-led efforts
Dedicated
edit-a-thon
An edit-a-thon (sometimes written editathon) is an event where some editors of online communities such as Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap (also known as a " mapathon"), and LocalWiki edit and improve a specific topic or type of content. The events typ ...
s have been organized to increase the coverage of women's topics in Wikipedia and to encourage more women to edit Wikipedia. These events are supported by the Wikimedia Foundation, which sometimes provides mentors and technology to help guide newer editors through the process. Recent edit-a-thons have given specific focus to topics such as Australian female neuroscientists and women in Jewish history.
An early-2015 initiative to create a "women-only" space for Wikipedia editors was strongly opposed by Wikipedians.
Some users have tried to combat this male-dominated space by creating support groups for female Wikipedia users, a prominent one being the WikiWomen's User Group. This group is used not only to promote women editing and contributing on more pages, but to also add more pages about women who contribute to society at large.
The
Wikipedia Teahouse project was launched with the goal to provide a user-friendly environment for newcomers, with a particular goal of boosting women's participation in Wikipedia.
In the summer of 2015, the WikiProject
Women in Red was launched on the English-language version of Wikipedia, focusing on the creation of new articles about notable women. Mainly through its monthly virtual editathons, Women in Red encourages editors to participate in extending Wikipedia's coverage. Thanks in part to the efforts of this project, by June 2018 some 17,000 new women's biographies had been added to Wikipedia.
Many
Wikiprojects are committed to promoting editors' contribution on gender and women studies, which include "
WikiProject women,
WikiProject feminism,
WikiProject gender studies, and the
WikiProject countering systemic bias/gender gap task force".
Expanding beyond the male/female gender binary, Wikiproject LGBT creates a space for "re/writing the inclusion and representation of LGBTQ culture into Wikipedia mainspace".
In 2018, one edit-a-thon organizer named
Sarah Osborne Bender explained to ''
The Guardian
''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in Manchester in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'' and changed its name in 1959, followed by a move to London. Along with its sister paper, ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardi ...
'' how men remove Wikipedia pages about women leaders. "I wrote a Wikipedia article about a woman gallerist and the next day, I got a message saying it was deleted because she is not a 'noteworthy person', but someone in our community gave me advice on how to edit it to make the page stay".
Jess Wade
In 2022, an article in
''VICE'' magazine detailed how
Jessica Wade has created more than 1,700 Wikipedia entries on women scientists since 2017 for many women whose contributions have gone unnoticed.
Wade has made a large contribution to a Wikipedia campaign that encourages the creation of Wikipedia articles about notable female academics, in order to promote female role models in STEM.
Wade has created new Wikipedia biographical articles to raise the profile of women in STEM.
As of February 2020, she had written over 900 biographies on Wikipedia. By January 2021, this figure had risen to 1,200.
By February 2024, it was over 2,100.
On 12 April 2019, ''
The Washington Post
''The Washington Post'', locally known as ''The'' ''Post'' and, informally, ''WaPo'' or ''WP'', is an American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C., the national capital. It is the most widely circulated newspaper in the Washington m ...
'' published an
op-ed
An op-ed, short for "opposite the editorial page," is a type of written prose commonly found in newspapers, magazines, and online publications. They usually represent a writer's strong and focused opinion on an issue of relevance to a targeted a ...
titled "The black hole photo is just one example of championing women in science", co-authored by Zaringhalam and Wade, advocating for increased recognition for women who contribute to science. After the first image of a
black hole
A black hole is a massive, compact astronomical object so dense that its gravity prevents anything from escaping, even light. Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity predicts that a sufficiently compact mass will form a black hole. Th ...
was released, media coverage celebrated
Katie Bouman's role leading the creation of the image processing algorithm. The op-ed emphasized the power of social media like
Twitter
Twitter, officially known as X since 2023, is an American microblogging and social networking service. It is one of the world's largest social media platforms and one of the most-visited websites. Users can share short text messages, image ...
and collaborative information repositories like Wikipedia for crediting women's scientific contributions.
As an example of insufficient coverage in the English-language Wikipedia of women in science, the article points to the deletion of the biography of
Clarice Phelps. Wade created a short Wikipedia biography of Phelps in September 2018. The deletion of that article on 11 February 2019
led to a prolonged editorial discussion and its repeated restoration and re-deletion. Katrina Krämer wrote in ''Chemistry World'':
Wade told ''Chemistry World'' she believes such omissions of scientific researchers from coverage in Wikipedia are regrettable, stating her impression that it accepts entries for even the most obscure popular-media figures.
By January 2020, there was a consensus to restore the article, as by then new sources had become available. As of 2019, of the 600 articles about female scientists Wade had written, 6 had been deleted for not meeting Wikipedia's criteria for notability.
Third parties
In 2013, FemTechNet launched "Wikistorming" as a project that offers feminist scholarship and encourages Wikipedia editing as part of school and college teaching.
In July 2014, the
National Science Foundation
The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) is an Independent agencies of the United States government#Examples of independent agencies, independent agency of the Federal government of the United States, United States federal government that su ...
announced that it would spend $200,000 to study systemic gender bias on Wikipedia.
In 2015,
Jennifer C. Edwards, the
history department chairperson at
Manhattan College
Manhattan University (previously Manhattan College) is a private, Catholic university in New York City. Originally established in 1853 by the De La Salle Christian Brothers (Institute of the Brothers of the Christian Schools) as an academy fo ...
, explained that educational institutions can use Wikipedia assignments such as encyclopedia's gender gap analysis and coverage of female topics to inspire students to alter the current gender imbalance.
In 2022, Angela Fan, a researcher at
Meta Platforms
Meta Platforms, Inc. is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Menlo Park, California. Meta owns and operates several prominent social media platforms and communication services, including Facebook, Instagram, Threads ...
, announced an
open-source software
Open-source software (OSS) is Software, computer software that is released under a Open-source license, license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and Software distribution, distribute the software an ...
artificial intelligence model that will be able to create Wikipedia-style biographical rough drafts that "will one day help Wikipedia editors create many thousands of accurate, compelling biography entries for important people who are currently not on the site", including women.
See also
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Racial bias on Wikipedia
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Geographical bias on Wikipedia
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Second-generation gender bias
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Systemic bias in Wikipedia
Notes
References
Further reading
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Media coverage
* Bort, Julie (15 February 2014
"A Growing Army of Women Are Taking on Wikipedia's Sexism Problem" Business insider. Retrieved 29 August 2022.
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Research and advice
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External links
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{{authority control
Criticism of Wikipedia
Gender equality
Sexism
Wikipedia reliability