[Gendergap] High-heeled shoes as a case study

[Sydney Poore]

Category:High-heeled shoes is an excellent example of the current problem
WMF projects are having with creating and disseminating content that is
unbiased.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:High-heeled_shoes

This category is different that most all the other categories about footwear
because it contains many images that are not primarily examples of
high-heeled shoes. Most other categories about footwear contain mostly
images of shoes or the lower leg(s) with a shoe or shoes.

The number of images in Category:High-heeled shoes is higher than most
categories about footwear. Approximately one- third of the images are of
full body shots of attractive females who are wearing high heeled shoes, and
a significant number of them are nude or posed in sexually provocative
positions.

There are random women who are wearing shoes and are mixed in with the
porn-stars and strip-tease dancers. These women are being objectified and
sexualized without their consent because of the way the the images are
displayed in  the category. See Wikipedia article on Sexualization
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexualization for a description of the term.

In each language that has Wikipedia articles about high-heeled shoes, the
content is about a type of footwear, so the links in the articles that lead
to commons are directing people to nudity or sexual content that they would
not anticipate. There are other problems with some of the images, including
unclear consent for the image to be uploaded by the subject of the image.

I see this category as a concrete example of systemic bias coming from
having a male dominated editing community.

Leather boots is only other category that I found that also has a large
number of images of people. It also contain a disproportionate number of
images of women who are nude or in sexually provocative poses.

I think that it is important to continue to talk about these issues in the
hope that more people with became educated about the problems with with our
current methods to collect, categorize, and disseminate content.

Sydney Poore
User:FloNight
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