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Male bias in cave rescue articles Suggestion

So, recently I have mostly been editing 2018 missile strikes against Syria and Tham Luang cave rescue. In the first article, the relevance and active role of women is made clear early in the article; Theresa May is one of the key players, and Nikki Haley, Permanent US Representative at the UN, soon makes an appearance to reassure the world that the United States is "locked and loaded".

But in the second article, it appears that the first forty-six individually named persons in the article are all male, with no females, transgender or non-binary persons named at all in the entire article. (Please correct me if I have mis-counted -- this does include the rescued as well as the rescuers.) This is despite Sky News having broadcast interviews with the commander of the U.S. contingent who was female, and BBC News having broadcast several segments of footage with female volunteers at the rescue logistics camp. The female volunteers were engaged in activities such as cleaning and cooking. I am certain that there was also footage of mothers, sisters, and female classmates of the trapped persons, but only reactions from male persons are included in the article. The article mentions that over ten thousand persons were involved in the rescue.

First, is this appropriate coverage?

Second, is there a wider gender gap problem in speleology and related emergency rescue procedures? If so, is there anything that we can do to fix this?

The name of the cave itself, incidentally, means "Great Cave of the Sleeping Lady". MPS1992 (talk) 03:15, 21 July 2018 (UTC)

Any thoughts on this? MPS1992 (talk) 18:03, 20 September 2018 (UTC)

Perhaps you could add a sourced quote from the commander of the U.S. contingent or information concerning which of the people involved in the rescue were transgender or non-binary. 2A01:E34:EF5E:4640:A9FA:2265:BB01:ECD (talk) 15:35, 8 October 2018 (UTC)

Thank you, this is a good idea. I will see what I can find. MPS1992 (talk) 18:14, 26 October 2018 (UTC)

To be honest, I'm not totally sure that reporting the percentage of women, men, gay, straight, lesbian or transgender volunteers is necessarily all that interesting. A sourced quote from the commander of the US contingent would certainly be good though.

Thank you for everyone's thoughts on this. I am researching further and will have some more to add soon. MPS1992 (talk) 02:48, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

Since my original post above, there has been the addition of mention of a female head of state in the article, so this is progress in the right direction. More to follow. MPS1992 (talk) 22:40, 9 April 2019 (UTC)

RfC notice: Jewish religious clothing

A Request for Comment that may be relevant to this task force is open at Talk:Jewish religious clothing § Request for Comment. Ibadibam (talk) 05:32, 24 March 2019 (UTC)

Data about BLPs

Andrew Gray has been kind enough to compile some data about BLPs, using Wikidata, and has written a fascinating blog post about it: Gender and deletion on Wikipedia. He has uploaded the graphs to Commons.

There have been questions recently about whether existing BLPs about women (BLPs that have not been deleted) were more likely to have been taken to AfD at some point. Andrew thinks that used to be true, but that things have recently levelled off. He wrote: "Female BLPs created 2009-16 appear noticeably more likely than male BLPs of equivalent age to have been through a deletion discussion at some point in their lives (and, presumably, all have been kept). Since 2016, this has changed and the two groups are about even."

Andrew, thank you for putting all this together. And many thanks to RexxS too. SarahSV ^(talk) 00:39, 7 May 2019 (UTC)

Andrew Gray: Thanks for this interesting research. It looks to me as if your work on BLPs is pretty reliable, despite the minor problems you mention. The results are generally encouraging as they indicate an overall improvement over the years in the ratio of female to male BLPs. As has been suggested on the Women in Red talk page, it would be interesting to have similar data on female vs. male biographies that are not BLPs. I was also wondering to what extent biographies of sportswomen could represent a major factor in this analysis as it appears to me that the majority of BLPs are in fact about sports people. It might be interesting to run queries which exclude sports people to see whether they do in fact represent a major influence (and if not whether new BLPs on all the other categories over the years have been improving at higher or lower rates). Although it is probably not at all significant, I have also been wondering what proportion of articles originally written as BLPs are now no longer categorized as such as the individuals they cover have since died. It might be interesting to know how many articles are no longer BLPs but I don't expect it will change the stats.--Ipigott (talk) 10:33, 7 May 2019 (UTC)

@Ipigott: these are all good points. I didn't know that about sports people. Tagishsimon said that a large number of women sports bios had been deleted at some point. @Andrew Gray and RexxS: it would be very helpful to know the following:

1. How many articles on the English Wikipedia were BLPs when they were created, regardless of whether they are BLPs now, and regardless of whether they were deleted?
2. What is the sex/gender ratio of BLPs at the point of creation, i.e. how many male and how many female BLPs have ever been created, regardless of current BLP or deletion status? (I'm sticking with male and female for now because the numbers outside these values are apparently very small.)
3. What is the sex ratio of BLPs that have been nominated for deletion at least once, and how many of each were eventually kept?
4. The same information for non-living biographies.

I don't know whether the above is possible, and if so how much work it would entail. If it's a lot, perhaps we should consider paying the person who compiles the figures. I'd certainly be willing to contribute to that. SarahSV ^(talk) 19:56, 7 May 2019 (UTC)

If you're just going on "raw number of BLPs" without differentiating between categories, then expect a sudden spike in the deletions of biographies of women for the next couple of months, in the wake of the deprecation of the special notability guidelines for pornography once people realize the implications and start clearing out the stub biographies. ‑ Iridescent 20:02, 7 May 2019 (UTC)

Good point, thanks. Glad to see the back of that. SarahSV ^(talk) 20:05, 7 May 2019 (UTC)

Hi all - glad to see this was useful/interesting. Some notes:

• I think we should all be cheered by the headline figure that the proportion of [surviving] female BLPs has been systematically outperforming the long-term average since 2012. It's taking some time to move the overall ratio, but that is definitely slowly being dragged upwards.
• The conclusions are all very dependent on my assumption that Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Some Pagename can be inferred to be about Some Pagename. I believe this is reasonable, and while it's always going to be imperfect, it's fine as long as the error rates are about equal by gender. I don't see any obvious reason they wouldn't be, but this is something I'm a bit cautious over and would be keen to hear any obvious issues I may have missed.
• My planned next steps are:

a) looking at some "occupational" subgroups as Ipigott suggests - I've just pulled down data for BLPs which WD thinks are "athletes" (414k, a little under half the BLPs, 16% F) and "politicians" (96k, 24% F), and will report back if they substantially differ from the general set. I'll also investigate if we can gather comparable data for non-BLPs (for tedious technical reasons it might be trickier, but I'll try).

b) trying to gather some data on deleted pages. My thought here is to look at a sample of AFD logs - it turns out to be reasonably straightforward to get a sense of how many articles on a given day were BLPs and their gender (even if deleted, it's usually apparent). We can't get age information, so it won't perfectly line up, but it does let us get some aggregate data on relative nomination/deletion rates and will also confirm if there was really a substantive change in ~2017/18 (cf David's comments on the other page). I think it would take about ten or twenty person-hours to get some decent data on this - if people are willing to volunteer a bit of time for this, let me know and I'll set something up to gather data.

With that, we have a decent chance of answering Sarah's question #3, which I think is the key to really understanding what's going on. Andrew Gray (talk) 22:15, 8 May 2019 (UTC)

PS: on Ipigott's query as to "how many BLPs have since died"

• 7494 articles in Category:2018 deaths, 5495 created before 2018, 2268 during the year; approx 56000 current BLPs created that year
• 8451 articles in Category:2016 deaths, 5683 created before 2016, 1884 during the year; approx 61000 current BLPs created that year
• 8635 articles in Category:2014 deaths, 4923 created before 2014, 2088 during the year; approx 53000 current BLPs created that year

So on the basis of that very cursory sample, the total number of "no longer a BLP" is rising pretty steadily but is outstripped by the overall BLP growth. (I'm assuming that articles created during the year are probably mostly on a "recent obituary" basis and were not BLPs at the time of creation, but it's hard to prove) Andrew Gray (talk) 22:35, 8 May 2019 (UTC)

PPS: a second update on deleted articles. Magnus has done a followup on this looking at deleted page titles and inferring gender from the name (ie if it's called "Susan Smith", probably a man, etc). This doesn't distinguish between BLPs and "historic" biographies, and it could only infer gender for about 2/3 of people, but of the deleted gendered articles, ~23% are female. From my data, ~23% of current BLPs are female, and ~26% of those with an associated past AFD are female. A lot to chew on here, but the numbers are all broadly in the same ballpark, and it provisionally suggests deletion follows nomination at about an even rate. Andrew Gray (talk) 22:58, 8 May 2019 (UTC)

Requested move: Chairman

In case anyone is interested, see Talk:Chairman#Requested move 8 May 2019. SarahSV ^(talk) 23:17, 8 May 2019 (UTC)