Documenting women's contributions to society faces an uphill battle against users' interpretation of Wikipedia's "notability" requirements
Gender is one of the most pervasive and insidious forms of inequality. For example, English-language Wikipedia contains more than 1.5 million biographies about notable writers, inventors, and academics, but less than 19% of these biographies are about women. To try and improve these statistics, activists host “edit-a-thons” to increase the visibility of notable women. While this strategy helps create several biographies previously inexistent, it fails to address a more inconspicuous form of gender exclusion. Drawing on ethnographic observations, interviews, and quantitative analysis of web-scraped metadata, this article demonstrates that biographies about women who meet Wikipedia’s criteria for inclusion are more frequently considered non-notable and nominated for deletion compared to men’s biographies. This disproportionate rate is another dimension of gender inequality previously unexplored by social scientists and provides broader insights into how women’s achievements are (under)valued.
Eugenics arguments abound in white nationalist abortion discourse
According to the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, nonwhites, globalists and elites are plotting to eliminate the white race and its dominance through anti-white policies and increased immigration. In that context, abortion among white women is perceived by white nationalists (WN) as a betrayal of their ‘biological’ and ‘traditional’ gender role – procreation of white babies. While WN condemn abortion among white women as a murderous sin, at times they encourage the practice among nonwhites to solve demographic threats to white dominance. In this study, we use mixed methods, combining unsupervised machine learning with close textual analysis of 30,725 posts including the term ‘abortion’ published on the WN website Stormfront between 2001 and 2017. We identify three broad themes: White genocide, focused on the conspiracy theory and detailing the active actors in its alleged execution; political, focused on political agendas and laws; and WN reproductive reasoning, articulating and justifying the contradiction between supporting abortion for nonwhites but not for whites via politics of difference that emphasize nonwhites’ supposed inferior morality. We discuss WN’s unique and explicitly racist discourse around a medical topic like abortion, a staple of the conservative and religious right for decades, and how it is used to alleviate their cognitive dissonance resulting from their dual-stance on abortion. Such discourse could be harnessed to recruit members into the movement and normalize extreme, racist ideologies
For incels, being a man at the bottom of a masculine hierarchy is still better than being a woman
Can negative evaluations of a broad outgroup paired with positive evaluations of a broad ingroup, sustain willing affiliation with even intensely self-derogating online communities? Synthesizing concepts from masculinities scholarship, social identity theory, and self-verification theory, this study compares language from two distinctive misogynist communities active on Reddit.com—Men Going Their Own Way, male separatists who positively frame members as superior to other men and men as superior to women, and Involuntary Celibates (incels), who openly derogate incel community members—to understand what sustains misogynist incels’ willing affiliation with the self-derogating incel community. Using thematic qualitative analysis, I find that while male separatists favor both their own narrower online community and the broader ingroup of men, misogynist incels engage in a patriarchal bargain, using relatively benevolent depictions of some men alongside negative depictions of all women to perpetuate broader gender inequality.