Something tells me that the S.E.P. does not draw a much higher proportion of female contributors than Wikipedia. For one thing, it wasn't mentioned in the article, and I have the feeling it would've been.
This is important because it tells us that the differences between S.E.P. and Wikipedia have only to do with subject matter and not procedure. Obviously trolls aren't interested in philosophy. But philosophy, much like Wikipedia, has a big problem with outreach to women.
Also, you know what's better than complaining about a lack of Wikipedia articles about female novelists? Writing one. You know what makes a better story than an empty complaint? The story about what you were about to reply what you thought was going to happen: the story about how your article was rejected by the editors. Of course you're just lazy and avoid effort by assuming it won't work. If you actually write such an article and see it deleted you'll have a leg to stand on and people will want to hear you (also, you can always preserve your hard work in your user-page).
You are making an argument from silence. "Of course you're just lazy and avoid effort by" expressing that feeling and not doing research. The list of authors for each topic is available at http://plato.stanford.edu/contents.html.
Looking at the "A" list, and using gendered assumptions about first names combined with a few bits of searching: Likely male: 98, Likely female: 16 Unknown: 1. That's ~14% female.
It does suggest that women are underrepresented compared to the available author pool. To point out though, the relative under-representation is larger for Wikipedia. The Wikimedia Foundation is aiming for 25% female representation.
If S.E.P.'s percentage were 35%, would it be indicative of over-representation of women as editors? If Wikipedia's were 35%, would it be indicative of under-representation of women as editors?
Do we know what percentage of the employed female philosophers would ever be interested in writing for S.E.P., and what percentage of women in general would ever be interested in writing for Wikipedia? This is an important variable for judging whether under-representation is a real issue or not.
I don't see how that can meaningfully be determined.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_bias_on_Wikipedia#Poten... has a long section about possible reasons for why females might not be participating, and ideas for how to improve the situation, with the explicit belief that higher levels of female participation will lead to a better Wikipedia.
Thus, is the "percentage of women in general [who] would ever be interested in writing for Wikipedia" using the current Wikipedia as the baseline, or some hypothetical best-of-all-possible Wikipedias?
In either case, how do we even go about determining that percentage?
At best this would be a latent variable which depends very much on the model you have. While important, it may be very hard to determine. (Eg, 'happiness' is an important variable, but unlike money, it's hard to measure accurately.)
My model in this case is that the editorial population will be similar to the reader population, but lagging by about 10-20 years.
We were discussing gender bias in S.E.P. vs. Wikipedia.
You've switched the topic to S.E.P. vs. philosophy publications, and observed that women are worse off in the latter, compared to either S.E.P. or Wikipedia.
Which would imply that the S.E.P. has been doing remarkable work to improve gender balance.
What is the gender ratio of the Wikipedia citations?
As a completely irrelevant comment, my intro to logic class, through the philosophy department, was taught by Jaakko Hintikka. It was very odd this evening to learn that he was one of the top philosophers in the world. I had no idea.
This is important because it tells us that the differences between S.E.P. and Wikipedia have only to do with subject matter and not procedure. Obviously trolls aren't interested in philosophy. But philosophy, much like Wikipedia, has a big problem with outreach to women.
Also, you know what's better than complaining about a lack of Wikipedia articles about female novelists? Writing one. You know what makes a better story than an empty complaint? The story about what you were about to reply what you thought was going to happen: the story about how your article was rejected by the editors. Of course you're just lazy and avoid effort by assuming it won't work. If you actually write such an article and see it deleted you'll have a leg to stand on and people will want to hear you (also, you can always preserve your hard work in your user-page).