I agree having a dataset that indicated “gender” of an article would be useful in research. However, I am a bit unsure how this should be done. Obviously there are lots of articles about topics like hydrogen and magnetism that are gender-neutral.

Articles about individual people can be classified as male or female (although I guess there will be some transgender as well). Articles about groups of men and women (men’s sporting teams, women’s sporting teams) can be too. But would we try to put a gender on articles about a sport, e.g. football, cricket would be male based on the dominant gender of players, whereas cheerleading and netball and synchronised swimming would be female? Or is that now denying the reality of smaller groups of the opposite sex who participate in those sports? Similarly with occupations. Most occupations now can be pursued by both sexes but again there is a strong skew in many of them, men are plumbers, women are midwives, etc.

Would “gender” have to be some sort of sliding scale? Barack Obama (male), Cricket (mostly male), Tennis (mixed), Midwifery (mostly female), Queen Elizabeth (female)

Kerry