Quantifying the Gap: The Gender Gap in French Writers’ Wikidata

Abstract

One of the recurring questions of world literary history is how to ensure that marginalized writers are represented. The advent of a data-driven literary history has made this question even more pressing, as collaborative and distributed projects like Wikidata have been shown to exhibit large gaps between groups, despite the diversity of topics and contributors represented. In order to get an idea of how entrenched the gender gap is within literary Wikidata, I will examine the representation of male writers versus writers who are women or other genders using Wikidata. Since the data are vast and complex, I will particularly focus on the subset that is related to French and Francophone writers in Wikidata with an eye to how the gender gap evolves across nations, geography, and time. I will show that the gender gap is less significant in recent periods and in smaller Wikidata communities and that the largest Wikidata communities with the longest histories have larger gender gaps. As in other subject fields, literary topics in Wikidata are disproportionately linked to male authors. Finally, I consider some ways that the gender gap intersects with linguistic justice movements and how the gender gap can be reduced in literary Wikidata. The patterns in the data and procedure may be generalizable to literary Wikidata as a whole, especially larger Wikidata communities, because the gender gap in both the French and the Francophone subsets of the data is close to the global average; there is also a higher-than-average representation of writers of other genders that resembles other large Wikidata communities.