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?

2

(i) How are notable men and women

presented in Wikipedia?

(ii) How are professions described on

Wikipedia?

3

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?

6

Who makes it into Wikipedia?

7

Angela Merkel Fritz Kuhn

Global Notability (Internal Proxy)

Google Trends

8

Angela Merkel

9

Fritz Kuhn

• Negative Binomial Regression Models

– Outcome Variable:

• Number of language editions (internal notability)

– Dependent Variables:

• Gender, profession and birth decade

10

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)

11

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

12

How are they depicted?

13

14

After 1900 Before 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

16

17

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.

20

21

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

22

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

23

Coverage

24 0% 50% 100%

Masculine

Feminine

Neutral

Page

No Page

Redirect

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

Images

26

Relation to Offline Statistics

27

Text

28

Male Bias

Female Bias

Relation to Offline Statistics

29

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

30

Joint work with

31

Markus Strohmaier

Fabian Flöck Olga Zagovora David Garcia Mohsen Jadidi

Eduardo Graells Garrido Fil Menczer

Questions?