Today is International Women’s Day and the theme this year is, ‘#PushForProgress’ in areas such as gender parity in all industries and society worldwide. Started by the Suffragettes in the early 1900’s, the first International Women’s Day was celebrated in 1911.
With the World Economic Forum’s 2017 Global Gender Gap Report findings telling us that gender parity is over 200 years away – there has never been a more important time to be mindful of this statistic and to push for progress for gender parity.
An interesting story today on the #PushForProgress theme is of UN Women tweeting about the global #WikiGap event, organised in partnership with the Swedish Foreign Ministry. The idea is to get more women contributing to the website, to address the gender imbalance on the world’s largest online and user-generated encyclopaedia.
Knowledge is powerful, and Wikipedia has the potential to shape our view of the world. But there is a major imbalance between men and women on the website that should be highlighted.
They have found that 90 percent of the people who add content to Wikipedia are men and there are four times more articles about men than women. The figures vary regionally, but the picture is clear: there is significantly less information on women and less information contributed to the website by women.
#WikiGap is an event today, on Internation Women’s Day, where people around the world will gather to add more content to Wikipedia about women figures, experts and role models in various fields.
International Women’s Day belongs to everyone and with the past year’s strong global momentum striving for gender parity, hopefully, there will be even more positive changes for both men and women for the near future.