Jul 8, 2024 By Paul Paterra 4 min read

Wikipedia statistics reveal that there are significantly more entries about males than females in the online encyclopedia.

Of the 2,009,049 biographies that appeared June 24 on the free site that is maintained by a community of volunteers, only 398,893 were about women, or slightly less than 20%.

The Wiki project, Women in Red, was established in 2015 to provide a better statistical representation of women and other gender minorities on Wikipedia. A list of women appears in Wikipedia in red because there are no articles about them, so there is nothing to which they can be linked.

The disparity is being addressed through Women in Red.

When the project launched, only 15.53% of Wikipedia’s English biographies were about women.

Dr. Laura Tuennerman, history professor at PennWest California, had the opportunity to help put a slight dent in the gap when she recently participated in an eight-week, online course called “Women and Politics in the U.S. Wiki Scholars.” Through the course, she received training to edit Wikipedia to include more information about females in politics.

“I got an email from Wiki Education (Foundation),” Tuennerman said recently. “Their whole goal is to work with educators and work with people who care about good information. One of the things they have noticed is internationally only 19% of the articles about politics or about politicians focus on women, which is disproportionate to reality. They wanted to encourage more people to write and to edit and to complete works about women in politics.”

After editing some Wikipedia entries, Tuennerman wrote Wikipedia pages for two Pittsburgh suffragettes, Mary Flinn Lawrence and Mary Bakewell, whose names she pulled from the Women in Red list.

“They turned out to be super fascinating people,” Tuennerman said. “They tended to appear in articles about women involved in the suffragette movement, but no one ever bothered to write an article about them (for Wikipedia).”

Tuennerman resourced numerous published stories about the women to create Wikipedia pages that tell their stories.

Lawrence was the daughter of Pennsylvania Sen. William Flinn, a powerful politician in Pittsburgh in the late 1800s. She was an active supporter of women’s suffrage and went on to make a mark in politics, particularly in the area of electioneering and in appointed political positions. Her home, Hartwood Acres, is now an Allegheny County Park.

Bakewell originally was an advocate for kindergartens but eventually devoted herself to women’s suffrage, working with a number of women including Lawrence. Later in life, she took up the cause of female clergy.

Tuennerman, who has been at PennWest California since 1998, said she learned a lot about Wikipedia through the course.

“I think often people dismiss (Wikipedia) because of the crowd source nature, but there’s a lot of safeguards in place,” she said. “I think there’s a lot more quality there, particularly in the sources, than I realized. But there are also a lot of holes. I think there are a lot of overlooked topics. There’s room for us to add. They’re trying very hard to identify gaps and recruit people to fill those gaps to sort of help out with some of those biases. They’re taking action to try to make things more equitable.”

In all, the group of 15 students in the class made about 275 edits to 50 articles.

“That work can be ongoing,” Tuennerman said. “You don’t have to stop because the class is over.”

In the fall, Tuennerman plans to have her students make edits to Wikipedia pages, especially those about women in politics and politicians in Southwestern Pennsylvania.

“When it comes to election time, a lot of people look at their ballots and don’t know who people are,” Tuennerman said. “Having that information be the best information possible I think is going to be the goal of our class. We’ll see what we can do to get better information out there.”