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"(Weitergeleitet von Journalistin)": The Gendered Presentation of Professions on Wikipedia

Published: 25 June 2017 Publication History

Abstract

Previous research has shown the existence of gender biases in the depiction of professions and occupations in search engine results. Such an unbalanced presentation might just as likely occur on Wikipedia, one of the most popular knowledge resources on the Web, since the encyclopedia has already been found to exhibit such tendencies in past studies. Under this premise, our work assesses gender bias with respect to the content of German Wikipedia articles about professions and occupations along three dimensions: used male vs. female titles (and redirects), included images of persons, and names of professionals mentioned in the articles. We further use German labor market data to assess the potential misrepresentation of a gender for each specific profession. Our findings in fact provide evidence for systematic over-representation of men on all three dimensions. For instance, for professional fields dominated by females, the respective articles on average still feature almost two times more images of men; and in the mean, 83% of the mentioned names of professionals were male and only 17% female.

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cover image ACM Conferences
WebSci '17: Proceedings of the 2017 ACM on Web Science Conference
June 2017
438 pages
ISBN:9781450348966
DOI:10.1145/3091478
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Published: 25 June 2017

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Author Tags

  1. gender bias
  2. gender inequality
  3. professions
  4. wikipedia

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WebSci '17: ACM Web Science Conference
June 25 - 28, 2017
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WebSci '17 Paper Acceptance Rate 30 of 85 submissions, 35%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 245 of 933 submissions, 26%

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  • (2024)Inklusive Online-Gemeinschaften? Über die Exklusionsbedingtheit jeder Form der Inklusion und plattformspezifische HandlungsspielräumeGleichstellung in progress10.1007/978-3-658-44365-8_5(75-91)Online publication date: 8-Aug-2024
  • (2023)Wikipedia gender gap: a scoping reviewEl Profesional de la información10.3145/epi.2023.nov.17Online publication date: 16-Dec-2023
  • (2023)Wikipedia gender gap: a scoping reviewEl Profesional de la información10.3145/10.3145/epi.2023.nov.17Online publication date: 16-Dec-2023
  • (2023)Diversity matters: Robustness of bias measurements in WikidataProceedings of the 15th ACM Web Science Conference 202310.1145/3578503.3583620(208-218)Online publication date: 30-Apr-2023
  • (2022)Hidden inequalities: the gendered labour of women on micro-tasking platformsInternet Policy Review10.14763/2022.1.162311:1Online publication date: 22-Feb-2022
  • (2022)Visibility layers: a framework for systematising the gender gap in Wikipedia contentInternet Policy Review10.14763/2022.1.162111:1Online publication date: 22-Mar-2022
  • (2022)The social embeddedness of peer production: A comparative qualitative analysis of three Indian language Wikipedia editionsProceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3491102.3501832(1-18)Online publication date: 29-Apr-2022
  • (2022)An Analysis of Content Gaps Versus User Needs in the Wikidata Knowledge GraphThe Semantic Web – ISWC 202210.1007/978-3-031-19433-7_21(354-374)Online publication date: 16-Oct-2022
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