Salon has also picked this up -
http://www.salon.com/2013/04/25/wikipedia_moves_women_to_american_women_novelists_category_leaves_men_in_american_novelists/

On Thu, Apr 25, 2013 at 4:13 AM, María Sefidari <kewlshrink@yahoo.es> wrote:
> The New York Times also has an article about this:
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/28/opinion/sunday/wikipedias-sexism-toward-female-novelists.html
>
> Kind regards,
>
> María
>
> Enviado desde mi dispositivo móvil
>
> El 25/04/2013, a las 01:21, Sarah Stierch <sarah.stierch@gmail.com>
> escribió:
>
>
> From The Huffington Post
>
> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/24/women-novelists-wikipedia-female-authors-american_n_3149345.html
>
> Attention female authors: you may be being segregated from your male peers
> on Wikipedia. On the online encyclopedia's "American Novelists" page, women
> authors are hard to find. Instead they have been filed primarily under
> "American Women Novelists."
>
> Vanity Fair contributing editor Elissa Schappell made this observation and
> posted on Facebook Wednesday:
>
> Women Writers take heed, you are being erased on Wikipedia. It would appear
> that in order to make room for male writers, women novelists (such as Amy
> Tan, Harper Lee, Donna Tartt and 300 others) have been moved off the
> "American Novelists" page and into the "American Women Novelists" category.
> Not the back of the bus, or the kiddie table exactly--except of course--when
> you google "American Novelists" the list that appears is almost exclusively
> men (3,387 men). The explanation on the pages is that the list of American
> Novelists is too long, therefore sub-categories are necessary.
> Idea: What about, "American Novelists with Penises" "American Novelists Who
> Are Vastly Over-Rated and Over-Paid" or "American Novelists Who Aren't Being
> Read But Should Be" (Here you'd find a lot of women, people of color...)
>
> Want to see where you're sitting for eternity? Take a peek.
>
> A disclaimer at the top of the American Novelists page reads, "This category
> may require frequent maintenance to avoid becoming too large. It should
> directly contain very few, if any, articles and should mainly contain
> subcategories." Schappell suggests that Wikipedia dealt with this space
> issue by moving the female authors off the page.
>
> The Huffington Post reached out to Wikipedia for a response to Schappell's
> claims but so far has not heard back.
>
> This is far from the first time that someone has expressed ire over the
> "second-class" treatment of female authors. VIDA, an organization dedicated
> to women in literary arts, pointed out that in 2011 the New York Times Book
> Review printed reviews of 520 male authors' books and only 273 books written
> by women.
>
> In a recent blog post on The Huffington Post, author Liza Palmer wrote about
> thedouble standard that exists in the literary world:
>
> All too often, when a woman writes a book about family and relationships the
> reader will sigh that she felt the narrator's inner monologues were "whiny"
> whereas when a male writer contemplates these same topics he is being
> "introspective." If a female writer uses humor in her dialogue she will be
> dismissed as "snarky", whereas if a male writer uses humor, he has a "biting
> wit." So called chick-lit writers get pinned with "predictable" endings,
> while male writers writing about the same topics have endings that are
> "satisfying."
>
> Perhaps it's time that Wikipedia realized that both men and women are great
> American novelists and should show up when you search for them.
>
>
> --
> Sarah Stierch
> Wikimedia Foundation Program Evaluation Community Coordinator
> Donate today and keep it free!
>
> Visit me on Wikipedia!
>
>
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>
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