Hello,
Due to a lot of free time these days I started a personal research project
on gender bias in contributors to the French-language Wikipedia.
My goal is to explore the relation between contributor genders and the
people they create articles about. The hypotheses are:
1- contributors predominantly write biographies of people with the same
gender. Simplistically: men write about men; women write about women.
2- there are a lot fewer female contributors than male ones. This has been
studied in the past but AFAIK we don’t have recent numbers and they are
all on the English-language WP.
If these two hypotheses are true, this could explain part of the problem
with gender bias in biographies.
What I’m struggling with –And I guess some people before me did as well on
the English-language WP– is the very low level of information we have on
contributors’ genders: on WP:FR, 60-70% of contributors have not changed
their gender in their user settings.
Does anyone have any pointer on this?
More insights below:
Looking at the contributors with ≥500 edits, 2.4% are auto-declared as
female; 27.4% as male; 70.2% as 'unknown' (undeclared).
By definition, there’s no apparent way to know the approximate gender
repartition of the undeclared-gender accounts.
The French-language Wikipedia shows male- and unknown-gender user pages
with the 'Utilisateur:' prefix while the female-gender user pages use the
'Utilisatrice:' prefix. Based on this, one would assume that women would
be more inclined toward declaring their gender so that the interface would
stop misgendering them. However, we know that female users tend to
under-declare their gender to protect themselves.
I assumed that older accounts would be more inclined toward having a
declared gender but that’s not the case: >60% of accounts of all ages
(except the very old ones but the sample is very small) have not declared
their gender, see:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gender_repartition_of_Le_Bistro_WP-…
Some users have user boxes on their user page with various info. Some of
them declare their gender. Surprisingly however, most of the users with
these boxes have not declared their gender in their preferences.
Out of the 434 users with a "I’m a woman" user box on their page, only
32% are auto-declared as female. Same ratio for the 2773 "I’m a man" users:
only 34% are auto-declared as male. It goes up to 36 % for the "I’m a
lesbian" box (N=14) and 40% for the "I’m a gay" one (N=86).
As I expected, predominantly-male professions have a larger male population
in their box usage, but still an even larger 'unknown' population:
Out of the 640 "I’m an engineer" box users, 24% self-declared as 'male'
and
1% as 'female'. For the 714 "I’m a computers person", that’s 27.7% and
0.6%.
However some boxes where I wouldn’t expect a large bias have one as well.
The Babel Italian users are 18% male and 2% female (N=2885). The Esperanto
ones are 24.5% male and 0.8% female (N=493).
There is certainly a bias in box usage: newer users tend to use them a lot
less than older users, and I would assume users who talk about themselves
with boxes don’t have the same profile as the average contributor.
Thanks,
--
Baptiste Fontaine
