[WikiEN-l] Systemic bias wrt gender

Wed Nov 22 23:40:01 UTC 2006

Stan Shebs wrote:
> 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
>
>
>
>   
I added the religious bias section to it, back in December 2005.

Gender bias is not my soapbox; this thread was not started by me, I have 
merely provided some anecdotal and statistical information. I believe we 
are currently in the examining and discussing phase rather than the 
solutions segment. I see as a more fundamental issue that women are less 
well represented in the editing pool, and wonder why that might be. If 
the editing pool were less unbalanced, perhaps our article coverage 
would be also. Then again, perhaps the women who are interested in 
editing Wikipedia are less interested in "women's topics" than in other 
subjects. I do note that [[Can opener]] is a stub, but look at [[P-38 
can opener]], the military can opener. Not a great article but longer 
than the parent article. Of course, any Pokemon character article would 
blow both of these away.
-kc-