A recent study provides evidence that female biology professors at top US universities are more likely to have their bios listed on Wikipedia than their male counterparts. This shift reverses historical trends and suggests that volunteer work to increase the visibility of women in science is having a measurable impact. A 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 to the public. One highly visible medium is Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia edited by volunteers, which receives more than 800 million views each day.
Because anyone with Internet access can suggest or edit articles, Wikipedia uses community guidelines to determine who is famous enough to have a biography page. Previous research has shown that Wikipedia has far fewer biographies about women than men. When women academics have pages, their entries tend to be shorter, family-focused, and more frequently suggested for deletion.
Historically, an estimated 80 to 84 percent of Wikipedia contributors have been men. This demographic imbalance has shaped the platform’s content, reflecting the specific interests of its most active editors. As a result of these biases, female scientists often faced higher barriers to entry into the site. A famous example is Donna Strickland. When she won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2018, she did not have a Wikipedia page because her editors decided in advance that her work did not meet the criteria for notability.
This digital gender gap is important. Because public perception helps shape society’s expectations. Wikipedia often serves as a primary source of information for students, journalists, and the general public. The lack of female role models on this platform tends to perpetuate the stereotype that top science is a male-dominated domain. It also deprives young women of tangible success stories in scientific careers.
Previous analysis of fields such as sociology, economics, and physics found that male academics are about twice as likely to have a Wikipedia biography compared to female academics. Women often had to publish far more papers to receive the same recognition in encyclopedias. To address this disparity, volunteer movements such as Women in Red and the Women in Scientists Project have formed to actively write and promote Wikipedia articles about prominent women.
David Álvarez Ponce, a biology professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, co-authored the study with the aim of bridging his technical skills with social issues. “What piqued my interest in this topic was a combination of conversations with female colleagues and reading research that uses hard data to document the struggles of women in academia,” Alvarez-Sponse said.
“My work as a computational biologist has given me a background in data science. I also have a background in social science,” he said. “I am interested in social justice and have always thought about how I can advance social justice through data analysis, which is what I do best.”
Wikipedia’s demographics are constantly changing, so reviewing content regularly can help identify changes in bias. The authors designed this study to monitor whether volunteering actually changed the representation of women scientists in biology. Biology is a subject with increasing gender parity among students, making it an ideal field to study.
To understand the current state of representation, researchers conducted a large-scale survey of biology faculty. They focused on 146 doctoral universities in the United States that are classified as R1 institutions. The R1 designation refers to universities that maintain very high levels of research activity and typically employ highly cited scholars.
This dataset included 5,825 tenured and tenure-eligible biology professors. Tenure is a type of permanent academic appointment designed to provide job security and protect academic freedom. The sample consisted of 2,104 female faculty members and 3,721 male faculty members ranging from assistant professor to full professor.
The researchers manually searched English Wikipedia for each census subject to see if a biography existed. They recorded various metrics for each page verified. These details include the total number of page views, article word count, and total number of times the page was edited in 2023.
They also used a database called Scopus to collect data on scientists’ academic output. This allowed us to measure each individual’s total number of publications, year of first publication, and total number of citations. They calculated the h-index for each professor. This is a widely used numerical metric that measures both the productivity and citation impact of a scientist’s publications.
Overall, the authors found Wikipedia pages for 197 female biologists and 278 male biologists. This means that 9.36 percent of the women in the sample have a history, while 7.47 percent of the men have a history. Statistical analysis shows that women in this particular group are 25% more likely to be featured on Wikipedia than men.
Researchers looked at how this coverage has changed over the past decade. When we looked at the creation dates of the biographies, we found that until 2018, male professors were significantly more featured on the site. However, this trend has completely reversed since 2022.
A closer look at the page creation data provides evidence that volunteering caused this reversal. Since 2015, Wikipedia editors affiliated with the Women in Red Project have created 78 of the 163 new biographies of women biologists in our sample. Student editors enrolled in university courses also contributed to some of these new pages.
The authors divided their sample by degree to see where the differences were most pronounced. Among the 1,338 assistant professors, typically in the early stages of their careers, coverage on Wikipedia was roughly equal. This gap appeared primarily among older, more established academics. Within the group of 2,994 full professors, 19.42 percent of women had a page, compared to 12.66 percent of men.
The researchers also divided professors into 13 groups based on their h-index scores. In the group with the lowest h-index scores, men and women were equally likely to have pages. However, in nine categories representing higher academic achievement, women were significantly more likely to receive attention than men.
The authors found an interesting difference in how the pages were organized. Considering a scientist’s academic standing and publication record, women’s biographies received as many views and edits as men’s biographies. There were also no significant differences in the number of foreign languages in which biographies were available.
However, Wikipedia pages dedicated to women biologists tended to have significantly longer character counts. The researchers suggest that this may occur because volunteers dedicated to writing about women often write very detailed texts.
Looking at the broader academic achievements of those featured, men with Wikipedia pages had higher average publications and citations than women with Wikipedia pages. This suggests that the standard of academic achievement required to secure a Wikipedia biography is currently higher for men than for women.
“On average, female faculty members in top biology departments in the United States publish fewer research papers per year than their male colleagues,” Alvarez-Ponce told SciPost. “Furthermore, their papers are cited less often than those of their male colleagues.”
“This is important because research papers and citations are two of the main ‘currencies’ for career advancement in academia,” he added. Additionally, female academics typically face heavier teaching loads and fewer research resources, which can affect their total publication output.
Despite the differences in publications and citations, an unexpected pattern emerges when looking at career progression timelines. “Surprisingly, the women in our dataset appear to have reached full professor status at the same rate as men,” Alvarez-Sponse said.
Certain limitations must be considered when interpreting these results. This sample featured only faculty at top research universities in the United States. This particular group may not accurately represent the profile of biologists working at small universities, education-focused institutions, and universities in other countries.
Historical data is based on individuals currently employed by these institutions as of 2024. This approach does not capture the Wikipedia coverage of scientists who may have worked at top universities in 2014 but have since retired or left the field. Future research could follow academic populations over time to obtain a more complete picture of career trajectories and media visibility.
Scientists can apply this methodology to other academic fields besides biology. Assessing fields such as computer science, mathematics, and engineering can reveal different patterns of online representation. Monitoring these changes remains an important part of understanding how digital platforms reflect societal changes.
“I will continue to conduct data analysis to understand and document various aspects of academic life,” Alvarez-Sponse said. “That includes comparing the experiences of women and men.”
The study, “Monitoring the Gender Gap in Wikipedia Coverage of Biology Professors,” was authored by David Alvarez-Ponce and Niveda Iyengar.
