[WikiEN-l] bizarre: Women Novelists Wikipedia

[Samuel Klein]

On Fri, Apr 26, 2013 at 6:18 AM, Andrew Gray <andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk> wrote:
> On 26 April 2013 05:19, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at fairpoint.net> wrote:
>> The thing is that if someone is in a subcategory they are then taken out
>> of the category. So, if the subcategories are applied, nearly everyone
>> should be removed from the higher category such as American novelist.
>> Obviously this was not thought through well. If there is to be a female
>> novelist category there must be a male novelist category. This will
>> become more and more evident as time passes and situation equalizes.
>
> This is normally the case, but there's an explicit exemption for
> gender: at least in theory, single-gender categorisation (where we
> have just "female" without a corresponding "male" category) should not
> be "exclusive", and people should be categorised in both.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Categorization/Ethnicity,_gender,_religion_and_sexuality#Gender
>
> Removal from the main category should (again, an aspirational
> "should") only occur when we are completely splitting it into gender
> subcategories.

That makes sense.  It's not how categories are always handled,
however.  And when there is only one gendered category, it is
predominantly female.  For instance, looking at the subset of these
where the category name starts with "male" or "female":
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Sj/Gendered_categories

The rare exceptions are categories whose members are predominantly
female.  For instance, you can see the reverse gender bias with beauty
pageants:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Male_beauty_pageants
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Beauty_pageants

SJ