
The internet being patriarchal and unequal is not a surprise, but sadly the default. What's encouraging is that feminist voices and movements are working hard to change this
Shyamal Lakshminarayanan was on the trail of Maude Lina West Cleghorn, a little-known amateur British entomologist who lived in Calcutta in the early 1900s. Shyamal, an independent researcher and one of India’s most active Wikipedia contributors, had come across references to her while reading about Hugh Cleghorn, one of the pioneers of forestry in India. Shyamal (he prefers to be referred by his first name)’s interest in the female naturalist had also been piqued by his own passion for entomology, or the study of insects — he has authored and edited several Wikipedia articles on insects, such as this one on “ant”.
Shyamal couldn’t find out much about Cleghorn’s personal life in the usual sources — official journals dating back to the 1920s and books on entomology written in that period — but he could see that her work had been meticulous and of a high quality, especially her studies of insect pollination and the longevity of certain insects. It was odd: Cleghorn is a Fellow of the (Royal) Entomological Society, the Linnean Society, and the Zoological Society of London.
Intrigued, he wrote to Lynda Brooks at the Linnean Society of London and Ann Sylph at the Zoological Society of London, requesting them to check their archives for more information on Cleghorn, mentioning that he was planning to write a Wikipedia entry on her. The information available was limited: Brooks wrote back to say that while she had been able to confirm that Cleghorn had indeed been elected a Fellow of the Linnean Society (named after Carl Linnaeus, the father of the scientific system of naming all living beings, a system still in use) on December 4, 1913, and that she had been nominated by Isaac Henry Burkill (Director of the Botanic Gardens, Singapore); David Hooper (Economic Botanist to the Botanical Survey of India); and Lawrence Lewton-Brain (Director of Agriculture, Federated Malay States). Brooks was also able to dig up some scattered information such as her address in Calcutta and an obituary in the Journal and proceedings of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, following her death in 1946. “I’m afraid we have no portrait and no manuscript material,” wrote Brooks to Shyamal.
The trail went cold, and although Shyamal had perhaps shown more interest in this long-dead amateur naturalist than anyone else in over 50 years, he did not have enough information to merit a Wikipedia entry. “Bad luck… sometimes I am forced to relegate my research to my blog… because there is no chance that it can survive on Wikipedia if there are not enough sources to cite,” he says. His post on Cleghorn can be read here.
It is a well-known fact that women in fields like science, technology, computing, sport, and even writing are under-represented on Wikipedia. Although such assessments are largely subjective, it is common to find substantial articles on male scientists and achievers who are far less significant than female achievers in the same field, while the latter are completely absent from Wikipedia’s pages. Articles on women scientists also tend to be largely written from a male-centric point of view, such as linking back to her male colleagues or co-workers, while such courtesy is hardly extended to the female counterparts.
The overwhelming reason for this is most WIkipedia editors and contributors are male — and when I say ‘most’, I mean more than 90%.
In fact, Wikipedia itself has taken note of this. “It is among the most frequent criticisms of Wikipedia, and part of a more general criticism about systemic bias in Wikipedia. The Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, agrees with this criticism and has made an ongoing attempt to increase female editorship of Wikipedia,” the Wikipedia page titled ‘Gender Bias on Wikipedia’ notes.
The overwhelming reason for this is most WIkipedia editors and contributors are male — and when I say ‘most’, I mean more than 90%.
“When we started, many of the Wikipedia pages for women scientists were stubs,” says Barath.
In 2011, the Wikimedia Foundation conducted a global editor survey, which indicated that only 8.5% of contributors to Wikipedia were women. Not much has changed in the intervening years, and most surveys show that the percentage of female editors and contributors is anywhere between 8.5% and 16% globally.
According to Ting-Yi Chang, a researcher with the University of Toronto who is currently on a one-year internship with CIS in Bengaluru, the same survey showed that in India the percentage of female editors is around 3%. Chang has been studying and writing on the gender gap issue in Wikipedia and other online communities, and her primary role in India is to work with the CIS group Access to Knowledge (“A2K”; funded by the Wikimedia Foundation) to raise awareness of Indic language Wikipedias and the gender gap among editors in India. She says that “access, self-consciousness (for being minority/female), and the idea of representative power are the main barriers [for more female participation] in the Indian context.”
“Although one may say that the three barriers can also be imposed on male users, we have to consider the societal setting and how male and female live and think differently,” says Chang. “In terms of access (to required device/facility and internet), it is possible that female members in a family can be denied the access to say, a laptop, when male members enjoy more privileges. At the same time, females are usually more self-conscious about their surroundings when accessing facilities in a public space.” She adds that access to personal leisure time is another factor.
Even outside of Wikipedia, women tend to avoid being “visible” online, and this is by no means an Indian problem, she adds. “We need to ensure a female-friendly place in our communities, and by having more women joining now we are also opening up more opportunities for the future. The idea of representative power means that women need to have the confidence and courage to edit whatever they think they can contribute. Although one may say this is more of a personal mindset problem, we also need to realise that in societies where women are not encouraged to be outspoken and assertive (and again this is not just in India), we tend to refrain from making public statements even when we know that we know better.”
One encouraging fact is that several of the Indian language Wikipedia entries have seen greater women’s participation. Take, for instance, the Tulu language Wikipedia, which went live in August 2016, becoming the 23rd Indic language Wikipedia. There is a fair mix of women among its 200-odd editors, primarily because of the involvement of educational institutions and workshops conducted in colleges, such as St Aloysius College in Mangaluru.
The internet was supposed to be the ultimate leveller — a truly egalitarian zone because men and women had equal access to it from the same time. However, it has developed to become deeply sexist in some ways — more so in certain communities and online groups. Why is the internet not as equal in terms of gender as it could have been?
Chang says that her research on this topic, including reading the works of people like Dr Tanja Carstensen, a sociologist and researcher with the Work-Gender-Technology research group at the Hamburg Institute of Technology, shows that sexism in our online communities is not a product of the internet; it probably should not be counted as a “failure” of the internet either, but it is a reflection of society — an “intensification even, as the anonymity and informality of internet that change the way humans interact with others.”
“In other words, perhaps we have to realise that the internet being patriarchal and unequal is not a surprise, but sadly the default… I see ourselves in the second stage of Carstensen’s summary (internet as platforms of feminist voices and debates) and Wikipedia can be a great catalyst in this movement. We need knowledge based on an equal standard in order to make our online space more aware of its sexism. When the idea of feminism can spread through the internet, through Wikipedia, when people start taking this issue more seriously, there will be more awareness of how the web can and should become for women,” says Chang.