Ghosts of Manels Past: Bill Maher, Wikipedia, and AI Still Lack Women's Voices in 2020

As Halloween approaches, ghosts of manels past have emerged, haunting GenderAvenger’s Twitter feed. Obviously, we have plenty to say about some organizations’ complete lack of progress.

Last year, Avenger Cat Del Buono tallied a year’s worth of guests on Real Time with Bill Maher. The results weren’t good then, and they are still bad. Whether it was interview guests or panelists, women made up just 24% of guests in 2019, and evidence points to this trend continuing on Maher’s show in 2020. 

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Then, there’s Wikipedia, which is known to give short shrift to women, particularly in science. Not only do men represent upwards of 80% of both biography pages and the actual editor population, but they are also over-represented in the citations, which tend to be key jumping-off points for additional research, especially for students. Professor Kecia Ali wrote that “citation is the currency of academia”, which tells you just how important who is cited can be.

In fact, this clear imbalance led physicist and past Avenger of the Week Jess Wade to start adding hundreds of biography pages for women scientists in 2017, but, despite serving as a resource for all internet users and being one of the most visited sites in the US, women continue to be marginalized in terms of who is featured and who is creating the content.

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Kirsten Menger-Anderson, “The Sum of What? On Gender, Visibility, and Wikipedia”:

“…is [Wikipedia] playing a part in perpetuating and entrenching long-standing biases? The gender imbalances in both the editor population and the site’s biographies — both over 80 percent male — are well documented.”

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Next up, Avenger Kathleen Schatzberg has been keeping tabs on Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac for years. Spoiler alert: it’s still bad.

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Finally, it seems no list would be complete without a poor showing in some aspect of tech. This time, it’s in the field of artificial intelligence. As you may recall from past Action Alerts, good gender balance is hard to come by at AI conferences and events. Unfortunately, this continues to be the case. 

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Avengers, we can’t let this stand. While we’ve seen definite improvement at specific events — CES made improvements, for instance — others continue to behave as though women aren’t half the planet. Heads-up manel-lovers: WE CAN SEE YOU. So, please keep watching, counting, and calling out imbalance where you see it, Avengers! Change can seem slow at times, but when it happens, we always know the counting was worth it.