[WikiEN-l] Systemic bias wrt gender

Wed Nov 22 22:41:27 UTC 2006

Puppy wrote:
> Article quality and content reflect the bias of their authors; whether 
> internal  or external (access to sources, exposure to topics) that is 
> the issue. Your example is of geographical/political bias. There is also 
> religious bias (see my user page), and many other biases on Wikipedia. 
> This thread is about gender bias, note the subject: wrt gender: as in, 
> with regard to gender, ie; gender bias. It has expanded to note that 
> there may be gender bias or at least gender imbalance within the editor 
> pool on Wikipedia, and explored various possible reasons. Your email 
> does not seem to be addressing any of that. I am not sure what you are 
> saying with your email: are you saying that geopolitical bias is more 
> rampant and deserves more attention than gender bias? Are you saying 
> gender bias is hard to identify? Please clarify.
>   
I'm saying that I don't know of any significant systemic bias relating 
to gender. Systemic bias can happen even when everybody has good 
intentions and is on their best behavior, so it's orthogonal to editor 
gender, editor behavior, etc. The original post mentioned scanty 
coverage of blowdryers, perhaps not a great example for reasons already 
discussed; are there better examples where topics of particular interest 
to women are being overlooked?

(I'm assuming you're familiar with [[Wikipedia:WikiProject Countering 
systemic bias]], which explains things better than I can. I note that 
it's primarily geographical - should it have a gender subproject?)

Stan