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

Conference paper | Konferenzbeitrag

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.

Object Details

• ISBN: 978-1-4503-4896-6
• Extent: Seite(n): 83-92
• Language: Englisch
• Notes: Status: Veröffentlichungsversion; begutachtet (peer reviewed) ; 9. ACM Web Science Conference (WebSci '17). Troy

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Proceedings of the 9th ACM on Web Science Conference 2017

Classification and Topics

• Subject: Sozialwissenschaften, Soziologie ; Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung ; geschlechtsspezifische Faktoren ; Bundesrepublik Deutschland ; Beruf ; Gleichbehandlung ; Suchmaschine ; Regressionsanalyse ; Internet ; Berufsbezeichnung

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Zagovora, Olga ; Flöck, Fabian ; Wagner, Claudia
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (who): ACM
• (where): Vereinigte Staaten von Amerika, New York
• (when): 2017

Further information

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3091478.3091488
• URN: urn:nbn:de:0168-ssoar-66077-2
• Rights: GESIS - Leibniz-Institut für Sozialwissenschaften. Bibliothek Köln
• Last update: 21.06.2024, 4:27 PM CEST