Reaching a milestone of20.130% on 23 Jun 2025,Women in Red changes notable women's representation on Wikipedia fromred-linked obscurity to an encyclopedic presence.
Welcome toWomen in Red (WiR)! We are a group of volunteer (unpaid) editors of all genders who live around the world and belong to many different language and cultural communities. While our project extends over many language versions of Wikipedia, this page is principally devoted to our efforts on the English-language Wikipedia.
We focus on reducingsystemic bias regarding gender representation (content gender gap) in the Wikipedia movement. Our goal is to "move the needle" in terms of statistical representation ofwomen and other gender minorities on Wikipedia. We recognized a need for this work in 2014 when we learned that, as of October 2014, only 15.53% of English Wikipedia's biographies were about women.[1] Without a particular percentage in mind, we recognized that with persistence, we could increase it, one article at a time. With only this in mind, Women in Red was established in July 2015, at Wikimania Mexico City, byRoger Bamkin andRosie Stephenson-Goodknight.
According toHumaniki, the percentage of women's biographies on the English Wikipedia isnow over 20%: specifically reaching20.003% by 16 December 2024. Using QLever, as of 9 February 2026, it had risen further to20.29%. That means that of 2,113,767 biographies, only 428,938 are about women.[2] Not impressed? "Content gender gap" is a form ofsystemic bias, and WiR addresses it in a positive way throughshared values.
Can we increase the percentage still further? Yes! But we need you in order to do so. How? There are more than 34,000 general forum comments from over 1,200 different editors on ourtalkpage.[3] Ask there. You don't have to be a member in order to participate in the conversations; just please be civil.
Do the articles have to be perfect when they are created? No. But establishing them according to Wikipedia's policies is the first step, and that's the focus of Women in Red: new article creation. Over time, other editors will improve these articles; maybe that's you.
Our WikipediaWikiProject focuses on creating content regarding women's biographies, women's works, and women's issues. Our editors create articles in many different language Wikipedias. The objective is to turn "redlinks" (like this one) intoblue ones. That's why we are called "Women in Red".
We take an inclusive view towards subject matter, editors, and language communities:
Editors: We do not focus on the gender of the editor. Anyone/everyone is welcome to be a member, participant, enthusiast of Women in Red. If you participate in WiR, you can join up officially using the box in the top right-hand corner of this page. You are also welcome to add our userbox template{{User WikiProject Women in Red}} to your user page, to produce:
Language communities: While Women in Red began on English Wikipedia, it is an international commitment with dozens of other language communities. Please add a link to your language's coordination pagehere.
Subject matter:
If the subject of the article self-identifies as a woman, a non-binary person, and/or any other gender minority, that person is included within the scope of Women in Red. Historic cases where it's unknown how they self-identified also count. The goal of the project is to increase inclusion, and we'd rather not block article subjects from being included in an article creation drive.
In addition to creating new articles, we create and maintain hundreds of lists of "missing" notable women. Some of these women have an article on some language Wikipedia, while others have no article in any Wikipedia. We call these lists, "redlists".
Click on ourRedlinks index to see our lists of missing articles by focus area, occupation and nationality. Like everything else on Wikipedia, this is incomplete, so feel free to add pertinent items to our crowd-sourced lists.
While all redlists have redlinks, our redlists are generated in numerous ways:
Every year, our members uploadthousands of images to Wikimedia Commons: photographs of women, their signatures, their works, etc. In turn, these images can be added to Wikipedia articles. This is another way people can be involved in improving women's representation on Wikipedia. Over10,000 new images were added in 2022.
WiR works by filling in missing articles based on extensive lists of needed topics. The index to our wide range of topics and nationalities can be found at the Redlist index. Please make these red links blue. Notable women without a Wikipedia biography can be added to any crowd-sourced redlists they match; and added to wikidata such that they're included in wikidata-derived redlists. We also have aguide to adding names to redlists, and tocreating new redlists.
This section is a transcluded subpage, and may contain more information than is shown here. To view or edit, go to/Article alerts (watch this section).
Thanks firstly toRonhjones, and now toGalobtter, we have a bot showingdeclined drafts submitted toAfC. Weekly updates highlight those most recently listed underNew Additions. With a little bit of attention, some of them could well be moved to mainspace, encouraging the editors who created them to progress on Wikipedia.
WiR maintains resources to help you contribute, including lists of topical books and external links, information on editing in general, and contacts you can reach out to for specific needs. They can be found atResources.
Academic research on Wikipedia's content gender gap is also documented atResearch.
This section is a transcluded subpage, containing more information than is shown here. To view detailed month-by-month results or to edit, go toMetrics.
The articles created for any month, including the current month, can be displayed by clicking on one of the months in thearchive box.
We track the articles we create each month.Reports bot updates these lists automatically, but you can manually add and annotate entries. The bot will remove non-existent pages.More details about the bot. Our metrics talkpage is here:Metrics talkpage
The evolving list for this month (see Archives box) is created by the bot which lists new women's biographies on the basis of their female gender on Wikidata. At present, the bot does not list women's works, associations or related articles but you are encouraged to add these to the list manually.
The graph shows the number of articles created each month. The apparent decrease for the current month reflects the number of articles created up to today's date. Only data on completed months indicate overall progress.
For personal metrics on how many articles you've created about women, seethis tool.
In October 2014 English Wikipedia had 1,445,021 biographical articles, according toa paper referenced on the project's main page. The number of biographies reported by Humaniki only caught up with this figure in 2017, which suggests that Humaniki information was incomplete until at least then.
As a result of figures presented byHumaniki, we keep posting on the main Women in Red page the percentage of women's biographies on the English version of Wikipedia. Increases are steady but marginal: for example from July 2022 to July 2023, the percentage has risen from around 19.3% to around 19.6%.
Thanks to an analysis presented byAndrew Gray on theWIR talk page, it certainly looks as if the number of men and women involved in sports has a significant influence on the statistics for women. A detailed account of Gray's work is presented in"Gender and BLPs on Wikipedia, redux", which he published on 2 August 2023.
The two lists below show that biographies of living people (BLPs) born in recent years are approximately 50% female if data on all categories of athletes are excluded. By contrast, the equivalent overall figures (including athletes) are only around 25%. As a result, biographies of very large numbers of male sportspeople seem to be responsible for the huge difference. Andrew Gray's detailed lists below document how figures for BLPs by year of birth have evolved over the years:
Overall development of BLPs since the 1920s for all biographies
Missing birth year BLPs – 150,574, of which 53,355 female – 35.4%
1920s birth BLPs – 5,096, of which 1,325 female – 26.0%
1930s birth BLPs – 39,055, of which 7,086 female – 18.1%
1940s birth BLPs – 95,602, of which 18,495 female – 19.3%
1950s birth BLPs – 128,518, of which 27,172 female – 21.1%
1960s birth BLPs – 145,300, of which 33,390 female – 23.0%
1970s birth BLPs – 150,539, of which 37,893 female – 25.2%
1980s birth BLPs – 171,072, of which 42,880 female – 25.1%
1990s birth BLPs – 150,880, of which 36,944 female – 24.5%
2000s birth BLPs – 30,042, of which 7,542 female – 25.1%
Development of BLPs since the 1920s for biographies excluding athletes
If wediscount all athletes using the infobox method, the results are:
Missing birth year BLPs – 140,177, of which 51,021 female – 36.4%
1920s birth BLPs – 4,321, of which 1,228 female – 28.4%
1930s birth BLPs – 28,978, of which 6,161 female – 21.2%
1940s birth BLPs – 73,095, of which 16,566 female – 22.7%
1950s birth BLPs – 95,893, of which 23,644 female – 24.7%
1960s birth BLPs – 96,175, of which 26,632 female – 27.8%
1970s birth BLPs – 81,682, of which 27,562 female – 33.7%
1980s birth BLPs – 58,078, of which 24,816 female – 42.7%
1990s birth BLPs – 23,281, of which 11,754 female –50.5%
2000s birth BLPs – 2,850, of which 1,539 female –54.0%
... thatAllison Lanier traveled between New York and Los Angeles to film for her regular role onThe Young and the Restless?(2026-02-03)
... thatAnahit Ananyan was credited with starting Armenia's tomato heritage?(2026-02-02)
... thatEmily Sutton illustrated an abridged children's edition ofShakespeare's First Folio with "red-cheeked gentlemen, sword-wielding warriors and ladies in striking attire"?(2026-01-31)
... that philanthropistDorothy Spotswood watered the concrete foundation for a new children's hospital?(2026-01-30)
... thatPatricia Allan had an abuser's name removed from theNew Zealand Prayer Book?(2026-01-28)
... that judgeCoral Shaw announced her second retirement live on radio?(2026-01-24)
... thatAmy Cudden was credited as "Daniel Radcliffe's mum" onAm I Being Unreasonable? due to apparently looking like Harry Potter?(2026-01-24)
... thatJan Ziff once wore a "World Tour" shirt showing every country United States Secretary of StateJames Baker had visited?(2026-01-23)
... thatBernice Tongate was the model for one of the most well-known recruiting posters(pictured) for the American military during World War I?(2026-01-23)
... thatChristl-Marie Schultes resumed flying six months after losing her left leg in a plane crash?(2026-01-21)
... thatPaulina Tamayo, despite releasing fifteen albums, preferred direct contact with the public to a prolific discography?(2026-01-20)
There has been considerable press coverage of WiR, to the point where the projecthas its own Wikipedia article. Below are some recent articles. To add articles to the list, visitPress.
^Graells-Garrido, Eduardo; Lalmas, Mounia; Menczer, Filippo (2015). "First Women, Second Sex: Gender Bias in Wikipedia".Proceedings of the 26th ACM Conference on Hypertext & Social Media - HT '15:165–174.arXiv:1502.02341.doi:10.1145/2700171.2791036.S2CID1082360.
