Sage and Friends Update Public Profiles of Women Scholars
Wikipedia is the fifth most visited site in the world but only 19% of its profiles are about women. On International Women’s Day, Sage and members of the larger social and behavioral science (SBS) community took on the challenge of addressing the Wiki gender gap head on.
At Sage’s Women in SBS Wikipedia Edit-a-thon, fellow publishers, professors, researchers, Sage employees, and others improved or added new articles for scholars doing critical work to advance their disciplines, improve how our sciences are taught, and come up with solutions to pressing social issues.
“Women are critical to social and behavioral science research and instruction, from their pioneering work of new methodologies to the application of their work outside of academia on policy and practice.” said Charisse Kiino, edit-a-thon participant and Vice President of College Product & Market Development at Sage. “In fact, today women fill more than 61% of social science related occupations. Shouldn’t a resource like Wikipedia also reflect women’s crucial role in social and behavioral science research?”
Coming from seven different countries, participants contributed live from Sage’s Washington, DC and London offices, and virtually after taking a one-hour asynchronous training. By the end of the day, the group had updated 18 profiles and created 49 new profiles.
As an independent company, Sage is free to focus not only on enabling knowledge for future scholars but also on bringing wider, public attention to the scholars who do the work. Charisse continued, “This independence gives us the freedom to spend time and resources to help social and behavioral science make an impact in the classroom and on the world. And through events like this edit-a-thon, we can help give voice to marginalized or historically overlooked scholars so that they can benefit academia and beyond.”
Listen to Charisse and Wikimedia representative Ariel Cetrone discuss the edit-a-thon on the Velocity of Content podcast. And if you are interested in participating in a Wikipedia edit-a-thon in the future, let us know.