Earlier this year, the massive gender gap among Wikipedia contributors was brought to the world’s attention — just 13 per cent are women. Now Santiago Ortiz has crunched the data behind the encyclopaedia, and the results are telling.
Using a gender API, Ortiz sucked out details about contributors from articles across Wikipedia in order to study the differences in male and female editing on the site. The result is an interactive scatter plot that shows the number of female and male contributors for each of the articles considered.
If you think it looks fair, check out the scales on the axes: the horizontal (male) axis shown here stretches up to 300, while the vertical (female) axis tops out at 22. The almost-vertical purple line represents where a one-to-one ratio in contribution would fall.
In fact, the only article Ortiz could find with more female than male contributors was about… cloth menstrual pads. That’s bad. But it’s not clear how to fix it. In the meantime, try to find more interesting outliers using Ortiz’s interactive visualisation. [Santiago Ortiz via Flowing Data]