Wikipedia's gender gap

Ada Lovelace

October 15 saw Brown University host an edit-a-thon that was intended to boost the number of articles on women in the fields of science, technology, and other areas (called the STEM fields). You can read about it here. October 15 is Ada Lovelace Day, named for a woman who was both the daughter of Lord Byron and the first computer programmer.

There isn't really a way to break down the number of people articles by gender, but there are almost certainly more articles about men than there are of women. Think of all the big fields: world leaders, actors, athletes, explorers, scientists. For much of human history, these pursuits were male-only, and in our patriarchal world, are still dominated by males. If a new article about a person is created on Wikipedia, chances are its about a man.

A gender gap also exists among Wikipedia editors. Wikipedia's own statistics report that only 13% of editors are women, out of 19 million or so total editors. That lack of diversity has been acknowledged by Wikipedia, which has attempted to attract a more balanced group of contributors. The Wikipedia:Teahouse project has a 30 percent female participation rate, according to this Daily Dot article.

In case you wanted to edit some articles on women in the STEM fields, here are some pages where you can do so:

List of female scientists before the 21st century
Women in science
Category:Women scientists

However, the question also comes up as to why women should have a subclass of articles to themselves--why not simply put Marie Curie in a list of scientists? In other words, you can add articles on any woman to Wikipedia by starting at Category:People.