Hoi,

I blogged about the issue of sex ratios on Wikidata [1]. The experiment I did with Harvard alumni was to get some idea about the number of humans who were not yet known as human. I added a substantial number of them to have an item for each entry in the category on the English Wikipedia. I assume that as a group they are relatively well covered; they are ivy league and some of the best and brightest studied there. When you look at the sex ratio for the Harvard educated, you will find that it is worse than for the general population. I suppose it is an indication of the amount of items that still need to be identified as human.

Thanks,

Gerard

[1] http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.nl/2014/04/wikidata-its-sex-ratio.html

On 21 April 2014 00:53, Stuart A. Yeates <syeates@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sun, Apr 20, 2014 at 7:11 PM, Gerard Meijssen
<gerard.meijssen@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> To be blunt, Wikidata gains the quantitative quality I am looking for when only male and female
> is added where applicable. Transgender issues with respect are edge cases.

Transgender issues are primarily raised because they're vitally
important for people today, but they're not the only issues.

Far more numerically superior are the issues of people writing under
other-gendered pseudonyms; that's a systemic problem, in the GND data
for example. "Lord Charles Albert" "Florian Wellesley" and "Currer
Bell" were only outed as pseudonyms of Charlotte Brontë once she
achieved a certain level of fame. Modern analysis suggests that there
are probably thousands if not tens of thousands of other writers who
never achieved that level of fame and never had their pseudonyms
revealed. GND and similar library data commonly base their gender data
on nothing more than the apparent gender of the name on the cover page
(librarianship practice, unlike archival practise, takes such things
at face value). To take that librarianship practise out of context and
assert that that those thousands or tens of thousands of authors were
men (rather than just publishing under male or ambiguous names) isn't
going to get you sued, but that doesn't mean it's not the
white-washing of generations of women writers.

cheers
stuart

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