Assessing Gender Bias In Wikipedia: Inequalities In Article Titles

Potential gender biases existing in Wikipedia's content can contribute to biased behaviors in a variety of downstream NLP systems. Yet, efforts in understanding what inequalities in portraying women and men occur in Wikipedia focused so far only on biographies, leaving open the question of how often such harmful patterns occur in other topics. In this paper, we investigate gender-related asymmetries in Wikipedia titles from all domains. We assess that for only half of gender-related articles, i.e., articles with words such as women or male in their titles, symmetrical counterparts describing the same concept for the other gender (and clearly stating it in their titles) exist. Among the remaining imbalanced cases, the vast majority of articles concern sports- and social-related issues. We provide insights on how such asymmetries can influence other Wikipedia components and propose steps towards reducing the frequency of observed patterns.