Men Are Elected, Women Are Married: Events Gender Bias on Wikipedia
This work addresses gender bias in online encyclopedias for Wikipedia editors and researchers, highlighting implicit biases that could reinforce social stereotypes, though it is incremental as it builds on existing event detection methods.
The study tackled gender bias in Wikipedia by analyzing event distributions in career and personal life descriptions of celebrities, finding that female pages tend to intermingle personal and professional events more than male pages. It used a corpus of 7,854 fragments from 10,412 celebrities and discovered asymmetric gender associations in events.
Human activities can be seen as sequences of events, which are crucial to understanding societies. Disproportional event distribution for different demographic groups can manifest and amplify social stereotypes, and potentially jeopardize the ability of members in some groups to pursue certain goals. In this paper, we present the first event-centric study of gender biases in a Wikipedia corpus. To facilitate the study, we curate a corpus of career and personal life descriptions with demographic information consisting of 7,854 fragments from 10,412 celebrities. Then we detect events with a state-of-the-art event detection model, calibrate the results using strategically generated templates, and extract events that have asymmetric associations with genders. Our study discovers that the Wikipedia pages tend to intermingle personal life events with professional events for females but not for males, which calls for the awareness of the Wikipedia community to formalize guidelines and train the editors to mind the implicit biases that contributors carry. Our work also lays the foundation for future works on quantifying and discovering event biases at the corpus level.