Dear h,
I think your "male gaze" hypothesis is very interesting. It's of course
possible to report on the number of female politicians or such using
Wikipedia/Wikidata, but comparisons to other indices are, well,
problematic. World Forum Gender Gap index reports a ratio of politicians
(female to male ratio is reported as Table E12: Women in parliament and
Table E13: Women in ministerial positions in
) .
Unfortunately, those are high level positions and I'd expect that all
but the smallest wikis would score well on coverage of those individuals
for their own language. What we would need would be a count of, let's
say, politicians by gender in general for those countries, and I don't
recall any studies doing that in general, particularly on a
internationally-comparative basis. GGI also has Table E4: Legislators,
senior officials and managers, but it compounds politicians with
bureaucrats and managers; through I guess it would be the best
comparison we can do here (count the instances of word politician,
official and manager in our data, compare it with the GGI indicator).
Another way of doing so could involve seeing if there are differences in
how A-language wiki reports on celebrities vs.
politicians/officials/managers for different language, ex. would
Japanese Wikipedia show any bias in covering Korean celebrities vs.
Korean politicians/officials/managers or even Korean parliament
members/ministers. Through some of that may be, as you suggest, material
for separate paper(s). We will see if we can report on any of those
differences. If you know of any better data to compare ours too, please
don't hesitate to suggest it!
--
Piotr Konieczny, PhD
Hello Piotr and Gerard,
I think a competing hypothesis would be "male gaze". That is to
say, the more female representation is not about a culture (defined as
national, ethnic, linguistic or regional, not macho/feminine), but
rather a gender-interest bias. Thus the more female representation
could mean more male dominant culture, which is against the
theoretical assumption of Piotr's research.
Note that East Asian Wikipedians that I know, especially those who
edit Chinese Wikipedia, are predominantly very young. Some of them can
be highly interested in opposite sex.
Check the following category pages as examples:
(1a) Female actresses of every countries in the world
http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:%E5%90%84%E5%9C%8B%E5%A5%B3%E6%BC%94%…
(1b) Male actresses of every countries in the world
http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:%E5%90%84%E5%9B%BD%E7%94%B7%E6%BC%94%…
(2a) Female Japanese AV (i.e. porn) actresses
http://zh.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Category:%E6%97%A5%E6%9C%ACAV%E5%…
(2b) Male Japanese AV (i.e. porn) actresses
http://zh.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Category:%E6%97%A5%E6%9C%ACAV%E7%…
It is quiet clear that the male gaze hypothesis seems to apply
here. More female presentation simply because they are there to be
consumed by men or boys.
So one of my suggestions for research is to select a few
professional categories that are of interest (say, politicians, poets,
entertainers, etc.) to do some cross-tab analysis.
Thus, I will be extremely cautious against using the current
metrics/methods as viable "gender inequality index".
As a proponent of "data normalization" and "geographic
normalization" method myself, I would distinguish two sets of
comparisons: one is cross-country or cross-language version absolute
value comparison, another is cross-country or cross-language version
"normalized" value comparison. By geographic normalization, I mean
that researchers must gather another set of cross-country or
cross-language datasets that captures some aspects of realities
"external" to Wikipedia. In this case, I would say the Wikipedia
represented politicians' gender ratio against the offline gender ratio
of politicians. In other words, "data normalization" allows
researchers to compare which language version are more or less (and
how much) equal than the corresponding offline societies.
BTW, the methods you develop to extract gender from biography
articles for large-scale analysis may also be re-purpose to study
other dimensions. One dimension that will interest me would be
nationality. It will be interesting to see the coverage, focus or bias
of a language version on people based on nationalities. Age might be
another one.
Best,
han-teng liao
2015-01-11 19:01 GMT+02:00 Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com
<mailto:gerard.meijssen@gmail.com>>:
Hoi,
Having read it, I find it is still very much a Wikipedia
oriented.It makes use of the toolset by Markus. That is fine. the
notion of diversity and notability is also very much culturally
defined. It would be nice to know how the different wikipedias
accept notability of people from other cultures and if it impacts
the diversity of their own articles.
I have found that many people do not have an article in the
languages of their own cultures. Often it has to do with an
interest in a domain that is more of relevance to the other culture.
Diversity is very much part of a domain; in Roman Catholicism male
dominance is obvious. I am curious if diversity in gender is
affected by such considerations and if items with a single article
are more in line with what is the norm for a culture, a domain.
Thanks,
GerardM
On 10 January 2015 at 11:51, Piotr Konieczny <piokon(a)post.pl
<mailto:piokon@post.pl>> wrote:
Here
(
http://notconfusing.com/preliminary-results-from-wigi-the-wikipedia-gender-…)
are some early findings from a research project I am involved
in (together with Maximilian Klein). (To find out more about
the project, see
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Wikipedia_Gender_Inequality_Index
and it's talk page). We are very curious what you think (don't
hesitate to be critical). What we would really appreciate
would be any alternative hypotheses (to the one presented)
that could try to explain why post-1950s Confucian and South
Asian clusters seem so much more inclusive of female
biographies than others (including the "Western" clusters).
Are we seeing a data error, or something else - and if so, what?
--
Piotr Konieczny, PhD
http://hanyang.academia.edu/PiotrKonieczny
http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=gdV8_AEAAAAJ
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Piotrus
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