Measuring Gender Inequalities
in Wikipedia
Claudia Wagner
Computational Social Science @
GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, Germany
Web-Science @
University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany

Who edits Wikipedia?
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(i) How are notable men and women
presented in Wikipedia?
(ii) How are professions described on
Wikipedia?
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Notable Men/Women
4k individuals (3% women)
11k individuals (13% women)
110k individuals (11% women)

Are both genders covered equally?

• Hypothesis:
– If Wikipedia functions as a glass ceiling then
the women who are covered will be more
notable. Large gender gap for local heroes,
less gap for superstars.
• But how to assess notability of people?
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Who makes it into Wikipedia?

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Angela Merkel Fritz Kuhn
Global Notability (Internal Proxy)

Google Trends
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Angela Merkel

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Fritz Kuhn

• Negative Binomial Regression Models
– Outcome Variable:
• Number of language editions (internal notability)
– Dependent Variables:
• Gender, profession and birth decade
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coef IRR P>|z| [95.0% Conf. Int.]
female 0.1186 1.13 0.000 0.111 0.126
birth decade -0.0096 0.99 -0.0096 -0.010 -0.009
…. … … … …

Local Heroes
• 45% of men and 40% of women are local
heroes.
– Born after 1900:
• 5 men for 1 women  16,7% (expected)
• 6 men for 1 women  14,3% (observed)
– Born before 1900:
• 12 men for 1 women  7,7% (expected)
• 13 men for 1 women  7,1 % (observed)
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Interest via Google Search
• On average, women who are depicted in
Wikipedia are of interest in more regions
(IRR=1.555) and during more months (IRR=1.322)
than men
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How are they depicted?
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After 1900Before 1900

Linguistic Bias
• Linguistic Intergroup Bias theory:
– We generalize positive aspects of people in our
ingroup
– We generalize negative aspects of people in our
outgroup
15
Maass A, Salvi D, Arcuri L, Semin GR (1989) Language use in intergroup contexts: the linguistic
intergroup bias. J Pers Soc Psychol 57(6):981-993

Structural Differences
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Hyperlink Network

Men are more central

Men are better connected
The k-core is the largest subnetwork comprising only nodes of degree at least k.

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Summary
• Coverage of notable men and women on Wikipedia is good (if
we compare with external lists)
• Women are on average more notable according to internal
and external criteria
• Less female local heroes than expected
• Topical difference and linguistic bias
• Structural differences
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Professions in Wikipedia
• List of ~4200 German profession names
– Male, female and neutral name for the same
profession
– e.g. Feuerwehrmann, Feuerwehrfrau,
Feuerwehrpersonal, Feuerwehrfachkraft,
Feuerwehrmann/frau
• Mapping of profession names to Wikipedia
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Coverage
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0% 50% 100%
Masculine
Feminine
Neutral
Page
No Page
Redirect

25https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalist

Images
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Relation to Offline Statistics
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Text
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Male Bias
Female Bias

Relation to Offline Statistics
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Conclusions
• Gender-neutral profession descriptions rarely exist on German
Wikipedia
• Also professions which are dominated by women nowadays refer
mainly to men
• Gender differences in the description of notable men and women
• Some inequalities simply reflect historic differences, others do not
– How to decide what is appropriate?
• Guidelines and automatic tools necessary to support editors
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Joint work with
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Markus Strohmaier
Fabian FlöckOlga Zagovora David Garcia Mohsen Jadidi
Eduardo Graells Garrido Fil Menczer

Questions?