Max,
Hmm, interesting proposal! I am not sure whether it can be very useful as it reads now. I have thought a lot about this and have looked at the concept "painter" pretty carefully. Yes there is a gendergap in the data as it is generated on a daily basis, but no, I am not convinced this is related to the Wikipedia gendergap in the sense of "you need women to write biographies of women". In fact, some of the most thoughtful biographies of women are written by men and you could maybe say that our biographies of men may improve if we get more women on board editing. There is however, a tipping point when it comes to writing about women on Wikipedia. In my work on female stub creation I have seen lots of examples where the stub existed and was deleted due to notability concerns. Lots of experienced editors (myself included) will only bother to write an article, even if it's just a stub, when the likelihood of having the article stick is judged to be at some mysterious level. I think we need some policy guidelines and some stats about how many articles about women were previously deleted. This may help us determine what the "academic bias barrier" is in accumulating female biographies in general.
When I think of what I would like in terms of "Wikipedia Gender Index Tools", I would like to see, per country of birth or per occupation or per external database, how the percentage of female vs male is across language Wikipedias. Already I am finding that the Swedish Wikipedia has the highest percentage of female vs male across the board in any arts field, followed by the Russian Wikipedia. The English Wikipedia is somewhere in the middle and the Italians are the biggest loser (but maybe also with the longest history of art historical terms that are documented, which could lead to a higher percentage of men across the arts born before 1800, but perhaps higher after 1850 - who knows?).
Once you start drilling down into the data you find all sorts of really weird conundrums!
Jane