The Wikipedia page for “Sex in the City” is significantly shorter than the page for “The Sopranos.” Therefore, Wikipedia must be sexist.
This is the kind of logic that has sparked National Science Foundation’s investment of more than $200,000 in research to find out exactly why Wikipedia has a “systematic gender bias.”
Researchers from Yale and NYU Abu Dhabi are working on the project in hopes of clarifying “where in the complex chain of knowledge gender disparities arise,” according to the Washington Free Beacon.
“Under-representation of female scholars and associated scholarship reduces the quality an completeness of Wikipedia, imposing significant costs on the millions of readers who rely on it,” reads the grant.
Wikipedia does not employ people to write the information on their pages and therefore does not control the ratio of women to men that choose to contribute. The claim that “Sex and the City” and “Entourage” can be used as gender equivalents is sexist in itself, so where is the academic basis for spending government money on this study?
It is true that the majority of Wikipedia editors are young, white, child-less men, but if we discredited the academic authenticity of that demographic we would also have to rethink many of the scholarly ideas we hold to be factual. The men writing Wikipedia articles are simply contributing their perspective on a topic. Women are fully capable of doing the same, if they so choose.
“The vast majority of men don’t contribute to Wikipedia, just as the vast majority of women don’t,” said Heather MacDonald, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. “The site has only 91,000 active contributors; that leaves a lot of men whose ‘voices’ are also not being heard.”
The Wikipedia gender imbalance is definitely real, but it doesn’t seem like a problem worth spending government money to solve. If women found it necessary to write a scholarly review of every season of “Sex and the City,” they would do it. Until then, we’ll be busy closing the wage gap and breaking glass ceilings.
