"Nobody would be able to say what a fair share of females in the article would be. However, I personally think that 5% is not much and that the contribution of women to economics is more important." This is kind of a cop-out. I'd like to know what the state of the representation of women is in the world of possible citations before adjucating whether we are below this line. Are 5% of academic papers in the field of economics published by women? I don't know, but this would be helpful information in determining whether or not the above proposal is meant to align our citations with academia due to some unconscious bias on the part of editors against women or is some sort of affirmative action proposal to increase the proportion of women in our citations for the sake of such. Chess (talk) (please use {{reply to|Chess}} on reply) 21:47, 29 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Good point. We're not here to right great wrongs, we're here to report what reliable sources are saying or have said about notable people, incidents, processes, etc. – Athaenara ✉ 02:46, 30 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
There does appear to be a significant gender gap in the field of economics itself according to the sources cited in this article, though not nearly as low as 5%. ––FormalDudetalk 05:11, 30 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
It could be argued, though, that “increasing the proportion of women in our citations for the sake of such” is one way of countering systemic bias. I don’t think we need to know detailed statistics about the contribution of women to economics to know that 95% of citations being from men is likely to be unrepresentative and worth improving on. — OwenBlacker (he/him; Talk; please {{ping}} me in replies) 09:22, 30 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
We face the same issue with the share of women among biographies. No one know what is the good or fair share (15%, 19%, 30%?). But in the last years, projects such as Women in Red have focused on this issue and made an effort to increase the number of biographies dedicated to women. I'm just raising the same issue at the article level (poke Chess). Of course we need to rely on sources and reflect the reality of the topic. But we have some editorial freedom in the way we write articles and we can develop some aspects of the topic. In the article about economics in French, I've dedicated a section to the question of women in economics. I think it's a good way to start (if there are some sources of course). Last but not least, it's also in my opinion one aspect of the concept of "knowledge equity", which is key in Wikimedia movement strategy (Wikipedia:Wikimedia Strategy 2018–20/Innovate in Free Knowledge). PAC2 (talk) 16:45, 31 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I am a bit wary of the methodology here. As acknowledged in the article above, only those people with Wikipedia articles get counted in the statistics. If we go with the opening premise that non-male genders are under represented in Wikipedia articles, we are compounding the error by multiplying two disparities together. For example, an article has x% of citations from males and y% of citations from females. Now, for the sake of simplicity, lets say 80% of all biographical articles are about males and 19% are about females. Only comparing citations with linked articles we have x*0.8 and y*0.19. This results in a far lower percentage for female citations in the graphs than is mentioned in the article. I am not sure how we improve the calculation methodology but it is worth remembering that the level of the imbalance reported is distorted by our own distorted data. From Hill To Shore (talk) 17:33, 30 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
From Hill To Shore you're right. This can be part of the interpretation of the results and one way to improve gender diversity in an article would simply be to create articles about women named in the article. PAC2 (talk) 06:55, 31 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Since the level of representation is being approximately squared by your methodology, perhaps the square root of the result would be a more accurate estimate of the representation. ~Kvng (talk) 19:36, 31 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
This occurred to me as well. In absence of information on any differences between the two proportions (% cited and % bluelinked), root-transforming sounds like a reasonable hack to remove the compound effect. --Elmidae (talk · contribs) 07:16, 2 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
You say in the text that you're measuring the "share of people cited in an article by gender" (later you refer to the percentage of "people quoted in the article"). I think most readers would understand this to mean that you're looking at the gender distribution of the authors of works cited in the article and listed in the "References" section. So it was surprising to see that you're actually measuring the people wikilinked from the article. Colin M (talk) 19:50, 30 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for the feedback Colin M. The term wiki linked is more precise but I'm not sure that everyone understands it. PAC2 (talk) 06:55, 31 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Even if the term "wikilinked" isn't perfect, "cited" is worse. It means it won't count a female author who either isn't mentioned, isn't linked, or is red linked in the references section, but will count a bluelink that says something like "Economist John Doe wrote his seminal work on economics while on sabbatical in France and having an affair with the musician [[Marie LastName]]", where the bluelink has little to do with the topic at hand. "Mentioned and linked" might be better if you truly think "wikilinked" is too jargon-y. As a side note, I'd argue that an attempt to do this same test but for references / Bibliographies only would be a worthy endeavor, just some articles don't have well-formatted citations, and you can't look at Wikidata for unlinked authors. SnowFire (talk) 23:42, 2 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@SnowFire: Yes, the tool cannot presently look at Wikidata for authors that do not have a link from the analyzed Wikipedia article, but many scholarly publications are in Wikidata, many of their authors have been disambiguated, and still a sizeable number of these have gender information, so by looking up the publications in Wikidata and their gender diversity, a more finegrained picture might emerge for the Wikipedia article in question. Daniel Mietchen (talk) 01:43, 5 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you for this interesting article! Zarasophos (talk) 09:15, 3 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Although it is noted that there is indeed a disparity, that is mainly because women were not entitled to study at degree level until the 20th century. As such, there were very few women who COULD be mentioned on such a wide topic as "Economics", and they would be massively outnumbered prior to 1940. I am surprised that there is no mention of either Anna Schwartz (co-edited the Friedman book), nor Elinor Ostrom (who is THE ONLY woman to ever have won a Nobel prize for economics). I have added Mary Paley Marshall to the article, as she co authored a book where her husband was mentioned (but not her!?!). I fear all this analysis & debate is less positive than adding stuff that is seen to be obviously missing Chaosdruid (talk) 03:34, 9 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@Chaosdruid: The analysis has drawn to your attention (someone who has knowledge of female involvement in Economics) that there is a gap in the article and you have made an improvement to it. I would say that is a positive. Similar analysis of other articles may help identify other areas where there are particular gaps.
Most of the "debate" above is about refining the method of analysis to produce more accurate data. With accurate data, we will be able to spot articles that have an unusual disparity and correct them. From Hill To Shore (talk) 05:44, 9 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@From Hill To Shore: I have no fore-knowledge, except A level economics - I simply did a search on Google for the top 10 female economists, read about them, and used that info. That should have already been done, since this page has discussion involving 8+ editors going back for at least two weeks. I feel that is a negative. Similarly these edits include removing a male author, instead of leaving him and adding the inserted female one; which actually looks like more of a negative considering that the article now does not include the counter statement to the previous paragraph end.
Perhaps action is more important than discussion - do we wait to see if anyone else actually adds the other 2 I mentioned? Maybe then we can do an analysis of why no one bothered to actually fix the thing you were all discussing? I will leave it up to one of the other nine or so editors to maybe add some detail on the ladies I mentioned as I feel perhaps there is a litle bit of looking for a disparity rather than curing it. I did not see a "gap in the article", I saw a gap in the editing of said article after someone had raised a flag.
... and yes, I get annoyed about things that are discussed and never actually acted upon Wikiwide, as well as hasty knee-jerk editing that tries to correct a perceived wrong but actually lowers the accuracy of an article. Chaosdruid (talk) 07:15, 9 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@Chaosdruid: So, you are complaining about knee jerk reactions but want 8+ editors to jump in and attempt to fix something they may not be familiar with? My interest and expertise do not lie with economics, so you are better placed than I to look at that article. Also, your example of a set of bad edits involve an ongoing content dispute on the article talk page that predated the publication of this edition of Signpost. Why are you trying to link an unrelated content dispute to the editors here?
You are also misrepresenting this discussion. While a few people here have talked about the example used of the economics article, most of the comments are about the principles and methods of analysis. Is there actually a problem and is the data a valid representation of the situation? You want us to fix wiki-wide problems but seem to begrudge people giving up their own time to discuss how we can better understand what the problem is and where we should fix it. That you wanted to improve the economics article and went ahead and edited it is great. However, you shouldn't expect every editor to conform to your expectations and timescales. We all improve the project in our own ways and at our own speed. From Hill To Shore (talk) 09:25, 9 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
