Female biology professors are now more likely to have a Wikipedia page than their male peers

Recent research provides evidence that female biology professors at top universities in the United States are now more likely to have a Wikipedia biography than their male peers. This shift reverses historical trends and suggests that volunteer efforts to increase the visibility of women in science are having a measurable impact. The study detailing these findings was published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Women have historically been underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. This lack of representation extends beyond university faculty rosters and into the public eye. One highly visible outlet is Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia edited by volunteers that receives more than 800 million views every day.

Because anyone with internet access can propose or edit articles, Wikipedia relies on community guidelines to determine who is notable enough to warrant a biography page. Past studies show that Wikipedia features far fewer biographies about women compared to men. When female academics do have a page, the entries tend to be shorter, focus heavily on their families, and are more frequently nominated for deletion.

Historically, an estimated 80 to 84 percent of Wikipedia contributors have been men. This demographic imbalance has shaped the content of the platform, reflecting the specific interests of its most active editors. Female scientists have often faced a higher barrier to entry on the site as a result of these biases. A well-known example is Donna Strickland, who did not have a Wikipedia page when she won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2018 because an editor previously decided her work did not meet the notability criteria.

This digital gender gap matters because public visibility helps to shape societal expectations. Wikipedia often serves as a primary source of information for students, journalists, and the general public. A lack of female role models on the platform tends to perpetuate the stereotype that top-tier science is a male-dominated domain. It also deprives young women of visible examples of success in scientific careers.

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Earlier analyses of fields like sociology, economics, and physics found that male academics were roughly twice as likely to have Wikipedia biographies as their female counterparts. Often, women needed to achieve a much higher number of published papers to receive the same encyclopedic recognition. To address this disparity, volunteer initiatives such as the Women in Red and Women Scientists projects formed to actively write and promote Wikipedia articles about notable women.

David Alvarez-Ponce, a biology professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, co-authored the study to bridge his technical skills with social issues. “What piqued my interest in the topic was a combination of conversations with female colleagues as well as reading studies that documented the struggles of women in academia using hard data,” Alvarez-Ponce said.

“My work as a computational biologist has led me to develop a background in data science, and I also have some background in the social sciences,” he said. “I am interested in social justice, and I always wondered how I could promote it by doing what I do best: data analyses.”

Because the demographics of Wikipedia are constantly changing, periodic reviews of its content help identify shifting biases. The authors designed this study to monitor whether volunteer efforts have actually changed the representation of female scientists in biology. Biology is a discipline that has seen increasing gender parity among students, making it an ideal field to examine.

To understand the current state of representation, researchers generated a large census of biology faculty members. They focused on 146 doctoral universities in the United States categorized as R1 institutions. The R1 designation refers to universities that maintain very high levels of research activity and typically employ highly cited scholars.

The dataset included 5,825 tenured and tenure-eligible biology professors. Tenure is a type of permanent academic appointment intended to grant job security and protect academic freedom. The sample consisted of 2,104 female faculty members and 3,721 male faculty members, ranging from assistant professors to full professors.

For each person in the census, the researchers manually searched the English version of Wikipedia to see if a biography existed. They recorded a variety of metrics for each confirmed page. These details included the total number of page views in 2023, the length of the article in words, and the total number of times the page had been edited.

They also gathered data on the scientists’ academic output using a database called Scopus. This allowed them to measure the total number of publications, the year of their first publication, and the total citations for each individual. They calculated each professor’s h-index, a widely used numerical metric that measures both the productivity and the citation impact of a scientist’s publications.

Overall, the authors located Wikipedia pages for 197 of the female biologists and 278 of the male biologists. This means that 9.36 percent of the women in the sample had a biography, compared to 7.47 percent of the men. A statistical analysis showed that the women in this specific group were 25 percent more likely to be featured on Wikipedia than the men.

The researchers examined how this coverage changed over the past decade. By looking at the creation dates for the biographies, they found that male professors were significantly better covered on the site up until 2018. However, this trend completely reversed starting in 2022.

A closer look at the page creation data provides evidence that volunteer initiatives drove this reversal. Since 2015, Wikipedia editors affiliated with the Women in Red project created 78 of the 163 new biographies for female biologists in the sample. Student editors enrolled in university courses also contributed to a portion of these new pages.

The authors broke down the sample by academic rank to see where the differences were most pronounced. Among the 1,338 assistant professors, who are typically early in their careers, the coverage on Wikipedia was nearly equal. The gap primarily emerged among older, more established academics. Within the group of 2,994 full professors, 19.42 percent of the women had a page compared to 12.66 percent of the men.

The researchers also categorized the professors into 13 groups based on their h-index scores. For the groups with the lowest h-index scores, men and women were equally likely to have a page. However, in the nine categories representing higher academic output, women were significantly more likely to be featured than men.

The authors found interesting differences in how the pages were constructed. After accounting for the scientists’ academic rank and publication records, the women’s biographies received just as many views and edits as the men’s biographies. There was also no significant difference in the number of foreign languages in which the biographies were available.

However, the Wikipedia pages dedicated to female biologists tended to be significantly longer in word count. The researchers suggest this might happen because the volunteers dedicated to writing about women often write highly detailed texts.

When looking at the broader academic achievements of those featured, the men with Wikipedia pages possessed higher average publication counts and citations than the women with pages. This suggests that the threshold of academic output required to secure a Wikipedia biography is currently higher for men than for women.

“On average, women faculty at top US biology departments publish fewer research articles per year than their male colleagues,” Alvarez-Ponce told PsyPost. “In addition, their papers are less cited than those of their male colleagues.”

“This is important because research articles and citations are two of the main ‘currencies’ for career advancement in academia,” he added. Female academics also typically face heavier teaching loads and fewer research resources, which can impact total publication output.

Despite the gaps in publication and citation counts, the timeline for career advancement revealed an unexpected pattern. “Surprisingly, women in our dataset seemed to attain the rank of full professor at the same speed as their male counterparts,” Alvarez-Ponce said.

Certain limitations should be considered when interpreting these findings. The sample exclusively featured faculty members from top-tier research universities in the United States. This specific group may not accurately represent the visibility of biologists working at smaller colleges, teaching-focused institutions, or universities in other countries.

The historical data relies on individuals who are currently employed at these institutions in 2024. This approach fails to capture the Wikipedia coverage of scientists who might have worked at top universities in 2014 but have since retired or left the field. Future research could track academic cohorts over time to capture a more complete picture of career trajectories and media visibility.

Scientists could also apply this methodology to other academic disciplines beyond biology. Evaluating fields like computer science, mathematics, or engineering might reveal different patterns of online representation. Monitoring these changes remains an essential part of understanding how digital platforms reflect societal shifts.

“I plan to continue to conduct data analyses to understand and document different aspects of academic life,” Alvarez-Ponce said. “That includes comparing the experiences of women and men.”

The study, “Monitoring the gender gap in the coverage of biology professors on Wikipedia,” was authored by David Alvarez-Ponce and Niveda Iyengar.