The government is spending big bucks to find out why Wikipedia is so sexist.
The National Science Foundation has awarded two grants — together worth over $200,000 — to professors at Yale University and New York University to research the “systematic gender bias” in the digital encyclopedia, reports The Washington Free Beacon.
“Wikipedia was launched in 2001 and has since become the world’s single most important reference tool and information clearinghouse,” the grant reads. “Unlike traditional encyclopedias, which are controlled by experts, Wikipedia was supposed to have democratized knowledge.”
“Yet an emerging body of research indicates that Wikipedia suffers from systematic gender bias with respect to both contributors and content. ‘How and why is this bias produced?’” it asks.
To help answer that question, Yale sociology professor Julia Adams was given $132,000. The government awarded another $70,000 to Hannah Brueckner, the associate dean of social sciences at NYU Abu Dhabi.
Their research will benefit the many men and women who consult the user-edited encyclopedia every day, the grant argues.
“Under-representation of female scholars and associated scholarship reduces the quality and completeness of Wikipedia, imposing significant costs on the millions of readers who rely on it,” it said. “The findings from this research should clarify where in the complex chain of knowledge gender disparities arise. The findings should also bolster ongoing efforts to address those disparities, in this case by improving quality and reducing bias on academic — and more general — Wikipedia.”
In recent years, writers have bemoaned the noticeable lack of women editing the reference website. It’s estimated that men account for 90 percent of the site’s top editors.
Deanna Zandt, a “media technologist,” argued in a Forbes op-ed that Wikipedia tells stories with a narrow perspective because most of the editors are “young, white, child-free men.”
“In order to fix it, we need lots of different kinds of people to jump in and start editing Wikipedia, too,” she added.
Last year, a New York Times op-ed called out Wikipedia for having a separate section dedicated to female novelists after the writers were removed from the “American Novelists” page. And others have grumbled that entries on supposedly male-centered subjects like baseball cards and “The Sopranos” are much longer than posts on topics that might be more appealing to women.
But not everyone believes Wikipedia has a woman problem.
“Wikipedia’s gender imbalance is a non-problem in search of a misguided solution,” Manhattan Institute fellow Heather Mac Donald wrote in Slate. “Besides, the vast majority of men don’t contribute to Wikipedia, just as the vast majority of women don’t.”