Measuring Gender Inequalities of German Professions on Wikipedia

TL;DR

This study investigates gender bias in German Wikipedia's profession articles, revealing systematic male overrepresentation across redirections, images, and mentioned individuals, with female bias limited to specific professions.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of gender bias in German Wikipedia professions, focusing on three key dimensions and highlighting the extent of male overrepresentation.

Findings

Men are systematically overrepresented in Wikipedia profession articles

Female bias exists only in a few specific professions

Gender bias is evident in redirections, images, and mentions

Abstract

Wikipedia is a community-created online encyclopedia; arguably, it is the most popular and largest knowledge resource on the Internet. Thus, reliability and neutrality are of high importance for Wikipedia. Previous research [3] reveals gender bias in Google search results for many professions and occupations. Also, Wikipedia was criticized for existing gender bias in biographies [4] and gender gap in the editor community [5, 6]. Thus, one could expect that gender bias related to professions and occupations may be present in Wikipedia. The term gender bias is used here in the sense of conscious or unconscious favoritism towards one gender over another [47] with respect to professions and occupations. The objective of this work is to identify and assess gender bias. To this end, the German Wikipedia articles about professions and occupations were analyzed on three dimensions: redirections, images, and people mentioned in the articles. This work provides evidence for systematic overrepresentation of men in all three dimensions; female bias is only present for a few professions.