New Delhi: For years, Wikipedia pages about female scientists were less likely to have biographies, their sections were often shorter, and many struggled to meet the platform’s vague standards of “notability.” One of the most famous examples was Nobel Prize-winning physicist Donna Strickland, who did not even have a Wikipedia page before winning the Nobel Prize in 2018. Now, a new study suggests that the tide might be turning.
Published on Wednesday in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the study examined all 5,825 tenure-eligible and tenured faculty members — including assistant professors, associate professors and full professors — affiliated with biology departments and programmes across 146 top US research universities. It found that female biology faculty are now more likely to have Wikipedia biographies than their male peers.
Researchers David Alvarez-Ponce and Niveda Iyengar analysed faculty members from R1 universities — elite institutions with the highest level of research activity — to understand how gender shapes visibility on the world’s most-used online encyclopaedia.
“Since Wikipedia informs a large portion of literate, Western society, it has the potential to either help perpetuate stereotypes or to help dispel them by providing role models,” the researchers note.
They found that 9.4 per cent of women in the dataset had Wikipedia biographies, compared with 7.47 per cent of men. Among full professors, women were significantly more likely than men to have pages on the platform.
The findings mark a sharp reversal from the past. Earlier studies had consistently shown that women were underrepresented on Wikipedia and often had to achieve more than men to receive the same recognition. Until 2018, male biology professors were still significantly more likely to have biographies. But by 2022, the trend had flipped entirely.
The paper builds on earlier research arguing that “the bar to be included on Wikipedia is higher for women than for men” while also highlighting that “who is covered on the platform—and who is excluded — matters”.
Women In Red and the push for visibility
But the researchers say the shift did not happen by accident.
A major factor behind the change was the rise of feminist editing initiatives such as Women in Red and Women Scientists, volunteer-driven projects launched to address Wikipedia’s longstanding gender gap.
Through collaborative “edit-a-thons”, these groups worked to create biographies for women scientists and academics who had long remained absent from the platform’s digital record. Many of the Wikipedia biographies created for female biology faculty since 2015 were written by editors associated with these initiatives.
The platform receives hundreds of millions of visits daily and increasingly shapes how the public understands science, academia and public life. For students, journalists and readers across the world, Wikipedia often functions as a first point of reference.
As Wikipedia content is being used to train artificial intelligence systems, representation on the platform becomes even more consequential.
The paper also found that biographies of women scientists tend to be longer than those of men, even after accounting for academic rank, citations and career length.
Still, the authors caution against reading the findings as evidence that gender inequality in academia has disappeared. Women continue to face structural disadvantages in research funding, visibility, promotions, and workload distribution.
“Fortunately, the situation of women in academia in general and in STEM fields in particular is slowly improving. Nonetheless, a lot remains to be achieved, and the academic community must remain vigilant,” the researchers conclude.
Preksha Chaudhary is a TPSJ alumnus currently interning with ThePrint.
(Edited by Prashant Dixit)