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• WP:GBTF

Welcome to the Gender bias task force, a task force belonging to WikiProject Countering systemic bias. A task force consists of a group of editors devoted to the management of a particular issue or topic on Misplaced Pages. This page has been set up to ease coordination of their efforts.

If you'd like to help out in any way, please add your name to the list of participants.

Scope

The aim of the task force is to identify gender bias on Misplaced Pages (including in articles, discussions, editor interactions, policies and implementation of policies), take steps to counter it, and raise awareness of how the gender gap can affect editorial and other decisions.

As WP:BIAS notes, a 2011 Wikimedia Foundation survey found that 8.5 percent of editors were women. The gender gap has not been closing and, on average, female editors leave Misplaced Pages earlier than male editors. Research suggests that the gender gap has a detrimental effect on content coverage. Articles of particular interest to women tend to be shorter, and women typically perceive Misplaced Pages to be of lower quality than men do.

Participants

1. Czar (talk · contribs)
2. Malik Shabazz (talk · contribs)
3. SlimVirgin (talk · contribs)
4. Gobonobo (talk · contribs)
5. Superbellymonster (talk) 03:29, 10 May 2013 (UTC)
6. GRuban (talk · contribs)
7. Samsara9 (talk · contribs)
8. Carolmooredc (talk · contribs)
9. Djembayz (talk · contribs)
10. DStrassmann (talk · contribs)
11. Piotrus (talk · contribs)
12. Geraldshields11 (talk · contribs)
13. The Vintage Feminist (talk · contribs)
14. BoboMeowCat (talk · contribs)
15. Obiwankenobi (talk · contribs) Interested in categories
16. Rosiestep (talk · contribs)
17. Mssemantics (talk · contribs)

To do

Improve biographies of women in the professions

• Useful infoboxes to add: Infobox engineer, Infobox officeholder, Infobox artist, Infobox scholar, Infobox person, etc.

Revise categorization guidelines

• Revise WP:EGRS - Ethnicity/gender/religion/sexuality categorization guidelines – to ensure that categories are used in a way that highlight contributions of different genders while not ghettoizing them.

Correctly categorize biographies of women

A large number of biographies, especially of women, are improperly categorized, since they are often isolated in a "women" only category and not in neutral equivalents. This was identified as problematic by Amanda Filipacchi and caused an important debate in the media about sexism and bias at wikipedia. In order to fix this, articles do not necessarily need to be placed in the parent of the gendered/ethnic/sexuality-based subcategory - they just need to be in the non-gendered/ethnic/sexuality-based equivalent, which is often a sibling category. For example, a contemporary author in Category:American women novelists should also be placed in Category:21st-century American novelists as well. A list of categories needing attention and a detailed procedure for correctly categorizing such biographies can be found at Misplaced Pages:WikiProject_Countering_systemic_bias/Gender_bias_task_force/Categorization.

Promote changes in policies and guidelines

1. Promote changes in guidelines for FA/GA articles to ensure their articles have all correct and neutral categories per WP:EGRS to avoid what happened with Maya Angelou (
2. what else?

Notes

1. "Editor Survey Report – April 2011", Wikimedia Foundation, accessed 7 January 2011.
2. Shyong (Tony) K. Lam, et al, "WP:Clubhouse? An Exploration of Misplaced Pages’s Gender Imbalance", WikiSym’11, 3–5 October 2011.
3. S. Lim and N. Kwon, "Gender differences in information behavior concerning Misplaced Pages, an unorthodox information source?", Library & Information Science Research, 32(3), 2010, pp. 212–220.