A deletion battle over a black female chemist’s biography has put Wikipedia’s gender gap in the spotlight.
Critics point to stats that they claim show that Wikipedia is biased against women and female scientists in particular. Only 18% of the 1.6 million biographies in the English Wikipedia are about women. The figure is lower for people tagged as scientists – 16% of almost 150,000 articles.
‘[Notability is] a very, very difficult subject,’ says Roger Bamkin, co-founder with Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight of Women in Red, a Wikipedia project that aims to increase the number of women’s biographies. ‘When editors are arguing against notability, people will say, “Well, it’s men who are rejecting women as subjects” – and that may be true. Nine out of 10 editors are men.’
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