Wikipedia has a woman problem. The problem becomes acute when it comes to women scientists. While Wikipedia is the fifth-most visited website in the English-speaking world, with 26 billion views every month, only 18.37% of its biographies are about women.
This percentage shrinks even further when it comes to STEM. Fewer than 15% of Wikipedia biographies about women scientists engineers and mathematicians.
In 2018, the perception gap came sharply into focus when a Canadian professor of physics, Donna Strickland, jointly won the Nobel Prize for Physics. Anyone searching her name on Wikipedia would have come up empty-handed, because, unlike her male co-winner, Gérard Mourou, she had no Wikipedia page.
This was typical. So typical that a young British physicist, Dr Jess Wade, decided to do something about all these missing women. Working at night, and despite having a full-time job at the Blackett Laboratory at Imperial College London, she has written more than 1,000 Wikipedia biographies of scientists and engineers who she felt had been marginalised. Most are women.
We interviewed Wade about the structural problems she encountered. She presented The Brilliant with four major hurdles she encountered with Wikipedia.
1: A predominance of male editors
“There’s considerably more white men editing Wikipedia than women or people of colour. It’s estimated that between 80 and 90% of the long-time editors are white men, the majority of whom are from North America, and that has had a huge impact on what’s on the site,” said Wade.
“The content that they think is important and worthy of being on the site is generally things that they’ve edited before or find interesting and, unfortunately, they don’t find the pages about women interesting or important.”
She’s also encountered a tendency for some male editors to dismiss proposed content about women or people of colour as merely part of a political campaign.
“It feels like they wait, find an opportunity to pull something down and then put all of their efforts into pulling it down rather than building it up again,” said Wade.
The solution, she says, is back-up – having someone who can jump in to support what you’re proposing. That can be achieved by “encouraging more people to edit so that we improve the diversity of the editing pools”.
2: Notability
On Wikipedia, notability is a test used by editors to decide whether a given topic warrants its own article. And what that boils down to, for a woman in science, is publications, media coverage and awards.
“Even if a woman is notable and impressive and doing incredible science or engineering, math or policy, then it’s harder to prove because they are much less likely to be spoken about in mainstream media and less likely to be sought for an expert opinion,” said Wade.
“And even if a woman is asked, often, because of unconscious bias or issues of confidence, they’ll suggest their male colleague instead. So even finding the sources to cite to prove that woman as notable is harder to do than it would be to do for an equivalent man.”
According to the Global Media Monitoring Project, only 24% of news sources are women and over their 20 years of research, change is slow.
Programs such the Superstars of STEM is changing the equation but this is where universities and research institutes can make change by focusing on helping women and other minority groups build their media presence.
Some science journalists have started to look at citing women more. Ed Yong, a staff writer at The Atlantic, wrote about how he spent two years trying to fix the gender imbalance in his stories.
3: Structural bias in science and engineering
“There’s a lot of kind of published evidence that women are less likely to be accepted in peer review, they are less likely to win prestigious grants and they are less likely to win awards compared to their male colleagues,” said Wade. “And all of that compounds that fact that it is harder to prove that they are notable.
“So even if they’re really exceptional, they are less likely to get their papers, they are less likely to get big grants and they are less likely to win an award because there is this built-in bias within academia.”
Her argument is not with notability per se, but how it’s assessed: “We need notability criteria, because not everyone and everything should be on Wikipedia. It’s just the way that we define notability in academia is biased because we don’t give women the same opportunities as men. Those rules would be great if women were as equally represented in all different levels of academia – they reflect a very biased workplace and that makes it even harder to prove that women are notable.”
It’s time, she argues, to start thinking about alternative notability criteria.
4: People think editing is harder than it is
Wade has found that the word ‘editing’ can be a turn-off:
“Editing and contributing to Wikipedia is incredibly simple, but when you say the word ‘edit’, people get nervous and think it’s coding or thinking it’s something that they’re going to have to learn,” she says. “Probably women are less likely than men to edit because they are busy (certainly, women academics are burdened with a disproportionate amount of admin work), or unnecessarily nervous, they don’t think to do it. Whereas, actually, editing Wikipedia is as easy as writing an email or word document.”
The learning curve comes in the style of writing.
“It’s hard when you are in the early days of editing; certainly, I found it hard. The way you have to write for Wikipedia is very different to anything else you write. Because you have to write in a particular way, it makes it harder to write about people that you really respect and particularly about women, because you have to justify why they are good enough to be there.”
“You also have to be neutral and you have to just have facts that you cite. You can’t say this is ‘fantastic’ or ‘phenomenal’ or ‘interesting’, you can’t be subjective, and you can’t put your opinion about them onto it.
Wade’s tips for would-be Wikipedia editors
Make sure they fit the notability criteria
“It’s a two-level thing. One is finding that great researcher and the other is proving they are notable,” says Wade. “Make sure that the person fulfils the Wikipedia notability criteria, which are quite explicitly defined.”
Before you start writing, find the media coverage
“It is really frustrating when you’ve done a lot of research about someone and then you come to write up their page, and find there is not enough to prove independently that they are important.”
“Source as many completely independent second-hand sources as possible – places that are prestigious and trustworthy, news organisations like the BBC, The Guardian or national newspapers.”
“These places will be respected and taken seriously by Wikipedia editors and also provides you with additional biographical information.
Can’t find the media coverage? Make it happen
If media coverage falls short, it’s not necessarily the end of the road, says Wade. “I’ve nominated researchers for prizes or reached out to people who work for journals and said, ‘Can you do a profile of this person?’, so that then it’s easier to prove their notability.”
“If you can’t find the media stories, then encourage your friends who are journalists, or work in academic journals or science communication, to start writing profiles because often there are really great researchers who just don’t get into mainstream media or don’t get recognition.
Writing the actual entry
Wade starts with sketching out a skeleton biography and recommends using an existing profile as a guide. It doesn’t matter if it’s a man, a woman, a historical character or someone contemporary, says Wade, so long as you “have open in one tab a profile, so you know the language, the format, the layout, sections and headers.”
“A Wikipedia page is highly structured. There is this short introduction that justifies why that person is important; in just a couple of sentences you need to explicitly and clearly say this person works here, has this position and is important because of X, so that everything else that you write in their entry is backing up that fact that they’re important enough to be on the site,” explains Wade.
If you are a Wikipedia editor and you come along and you see that introduction, it’s much harder to delete it if the person’s put the information there about how they fulfil the notability criteria, but that comes from practice. And that comes from how many pages you’ve looked at and written before.”
Wikipedia entries take time, not money…and that’s a beautiful thing
Wade has regularly collaborated with Dr Maryam Zaringhalam, who serves on the leadership group of 500 Women. Together they are currently working on creating Wikipedia entries for women working on the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus.
“I feel like the beautiful thing with Wikipedia is that you can do it independently, wherever you are in the world, and then other people can come online to support you, but you don’t need big travel grants to do it. You don’t need huge expensive fancy pieces of kit. You just can do it in your pyjamas late at night. And I think that’s really wonderful in a way that it’s something so simple but can be reached and read by people all over the world, almost as quickly as you click send.”
What’s the impact?
Wade has written over 1,000 entries, all after hours. Most of the people have no idea that that she has created entries for them and for Wade the lack of ego involved is personally satisfying.
“I really love the idea that people just stumble across the page and the majority of them won’t have any idea about who wrote it or why they wrote it.”
As a scientist, this work has also given Wade a greater appreciation of other disciplines and how they connect with each other:
“It takes me to so many new places in science that I otherwise wouldn’t have the capacity to get to. I learn so many different things because of Wikipedia editing.”
At the moment I’m trying to write pages around women who are working on coronavirus … developing tests and vaccinations and looking at the economics of it and the politics of it … That has given me a whole better way to think about this virus and understand it and even just to discuss it with my colleagues and my family.”
Most important for Wade is the impact her contributions have had on the people she has created entries for.
“There’s this instant feedback of people responding to the pages, and responding particularly to their pages. If you are from an under-represented minority and suddenly you get a Wikipedia page, that is quite a thrill. I love that.
“There is a fantastic health officer in Canada called Bonnie Henry. I made her page a couple of weeks ago and then yesterday she was on an American news channel. And all of these people reached out to let me know that she was on TV. I just think it’s so great that people who are watching the news can just Google whoever it is that’s on and see the Wikipedia page because it goes to the top of Google. “There’s enormous credibility that comes from being on Wikipedia”
She also thinks that Wikipedia is a force against fake news.
“Wikipedia entries are also completely nonpartisan. They’re rooted in facts from reliable sources. When you write a page, people from across the political spectrum read and engage with it. And I think that’s more important now than probably ever before.”
As Wade and Maryam Zaringhalam so poignantly wrote in Nature in 2018,
So often, we hear that girls in science need more role models and inspiration. We’re asked, ‘Where are the women in science?’, as if we’re not already here, working in the lab or the field.”
Follow Jess Wade on Twitter
Article by Kylie Ahern
Photo Credit: © Imperial College London