Wikipedia wants to increase the incredibly small portion of its pages devoted to women. Men’s Rights Redditors don’t think that women are notable enough

Wikipedia faces a deeply rooted man problem, the problem being that they have proportionately way too many of them writing and editing the site. Indeed, a 2018 survey found that 90 percent of Wikipedia editors are men; only 8.8 percent are women.

This incredibly lopsided gender imbalance leads to sometime curious results. Consider: Wikipedia’s article on International Women’s Day, an official holiday in more than two dozen countries, and celebrated (officially or not) by hundreds of millions of people worldwide, has a Wikipedia entry that is a little over 3000 words long. International Men’s Day, an obscure holiday celebrated by virtually no one, has somehow gotten itself a Wikipedia entry of nearly 8000 words, well more than double the number of words in the IWD entry.

Perhaps even more tellingly, less than twenty percent of the biographies featured on Wikipedia are devoted to women despite women making up, you know, literally half the population.

Wikipedia has made many (largely fruitless) attempts over the years to narrow its deeply ingrown gender gap, recently launching a new initiative designed to “celebrate women” by encouraging women and others to pull together new biographies of notable women for the site in honor of International Women’s Day and Women’s History Month.

Over on the Men’s Rights subreddit, the regulars are pretty sure there haven’t been enough notable women over the course of human history to merit such an effort.

“”Wouldn’t people have digged up that stuff already?” writes someone called Parzival_007.

I mean if we have to dig up more, we would have to write about ordinary things presented extraordinary. Unless I am wrong about my first presumption of course.

Other commenters sarcastically suggest that Wikipedia’s volunteers write up biographies of ex-girlfriends and the literal woman next door. “Can i do one about Cassie the girl I dated right after college who developed a oxy addiction and robbed my grandmother’s medicine cabinet,” asks someone called Oxynewbdone.

“The ‘problem’ is that there weren’t enough notable females in history to make up that [gender] gap, because history was made by men,” declares shadowfalcon76.

And I mean that literally, as in all the notable women of history already have articles, and yet men did so much more in the past that their contributions just simply outnumber women by orders of magnitude.

You would have to make stories up wholesale from fiction to make up that gap, because human history was simply dominated by men as a matter of course. That’s not a judgment call or anything, just literal fact. Can’t really justify posting articles to Wikipedia without verifiable sources and making up fake people.

Bahard9 agrees:

The problem is they’re artificially increasing the historical female presence in their articles when women did less notable things than men for the development of mankind. That’s a fact.

It’s just like “affermative actions” – when girls get easier tests to access traditionally male-lead faculties.

Airforce987 adds:

For thousands of years of recorded history, it was almost exclusively men that were talked about. The women that were notable already have in depth articles. We can’t go and find more women to write biographies about if there’s no source to draw from.

Frosty-Gate-8094, meanwhile, thinks he’s figured out just why there are, in his mind, so few notable women in the world. It’s because men were willing to risk their lives and careers to invent new things, while women sat on their butts eating bon bons.

“Women weren’t overlooked, he declares.

They simply preferred to take the safer route to life. Scientific inventions were risky and uncertain. Including risk of death or being ostracized (Gallileo).

See how women behaved when Russia attacked Ukraine. That’s the exact reason why women didn’t make big scientific contributions. When faced with challenges, women flee. Men do not have that choice.

I really hope none of these guys are Wikipedia editors.

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