The gender gap in U.S. biology professors’ representation on Wikipedia has reversed, with women now being more likely than their male colleagues to have their own biography on the website, according to a new analysis from scholars at the University of Nevada, Reno.
For their study, the authors created a census of 2,104 women and 3,721 men employed as tenure-track or tenured biology faculty members at 146 R1 universities in the United States in 2024. In this cohort, women represented 46.94 percent of assistant professors, 38.51 percent of associate professors, and 30.09 percent of full professors. Overall, 9.36 percent of women and 7.47 percent of men included in the study had a Wikipedia biography.
The authors next examined gender differences in Wikipedia representation at each faculty rank. Among assistant professors, there was no statistical difference in the share of women and men with Wikipedia biographies. At the associate professor level, 3.13 percent of women and 0.87 percent of men had a Wikipedia biography. The largest gender difference was found among full professors; some 19.42 percent of women had a Wikipedia biography compared to 12.66 percent of their male counterparts.
There are also differences in men and women’s representation on Wikipedia based on their academic institutions. Women biology faculty at the sample’s top 100 universities were more likely than their male counterparts to have a Wikipedia biography, while men and women at the bottom 46 universities were similarly likely to have a biography on Wikipedia. A similar trend was found based on faculty members’ research output, with the gender gap favoring women emerging among the sample’s most cited biology professors.
Notably, the authors found women biology professors’ increased likelihood to be featured on Wikipedia is a recent trend. Women in the study sample were significantly less likely to be featured on the platform until 2018. In 2022, the trend reversed and by 2024, women were 25 percent more likely than men to have a Wikipedia biography. Additionally, women’s biographies were found to be longer, on average, than men’s entries.
While these results suggest women’s representation and status in STEM is strengthening, the authors caution that these findings are specific to biology and may not extend to other scientific fields.
“Our results contribute to the emerging view that, fortunately, the situation of women in academia in general and in STEM fields in particular is slowly improving,” the authors conclude. “Nonetheless, a lot remains to be achieved, and the academic community must remain vigilant and continue to monitor the different dimensions of the gender gap across the different disciplines.”