The politics of the Sochi Paralympics

I should be reporting on this for Wikinews, but I am not.  At the present, despite the military situation in the Ukraine with what appears to be an effective Russian invasion? incursion? foreign power putting a military force into to protest its ethnic people who make up 60% of the local population… the trains between the Ukraine and Russia appear to be operating normally.  This includes in the Crimea and along other parts of the border.

Over in Canada, the Government has ordered their Ambassador to Russia to leave Moscow because of the ongoing situation.  On a Paralympic note, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom has announced he and members of his Cabinet do not plan to attend the Sochi Paralympic Games because of the Ukrainian situation.

The United States Government has advised its citizens to avoid the Ukraine (especially the Crimea region), and the USMNT has moved a game scheduled for today to Cyrpus (where a referee was recently beaten).  No extra alerts for Americans going to Russia though. I’m not feeling particularly unsafe about going, but I am a bit queasy given everything.  Russia is not LGBT friendly.  The USA doesn’t have a particularly good relationship with Russia at the moment, and Russia culturally has always been held up as one of the great threats to the United States.  I grew up in the dying throws of the Soviet era, but I can remember the picture painted of Russia, and it wasn’t pleasant.

That said, on a Paralympic level, I have information on tickets to the opening ceremony.  I have registered to attend the IPC Hall of Fame induction ceremony.  I’ve watched a ton of Team USA Paralympic videos. I’ve read more on the rules of the various sports and the classification process.  I feel ready and knowledgeable, and like I should be able to do some good reporting.

Wikipedia’s selective gendering of national team article names

In an earlier post, I talked about how some articles are over represented when it comes to article’s about men’s versus women’s national teams.  I know from my own experiences that many articles about men’s national teams are gendered while women’s teams are not.

The graph above clearly shows this pattern. The majority of women’s article titles are gendered.  The majority of men’s national team articles are not.  Beyond totals, one way of understanding English Wikipedia’s systemic bias against women in sport is to look at what happens when there is a pair of articles about a country’s national team for a particular sport, with one article about the women’s team and one article about the men’s team. Softball, water polo, pitch and putt, lacrosse, inline hockey, floorball, goalball and wheelchair basketball national teams are pretty much all have titles indicating gender, even in situations where there is no match pairs.  Tennis articles consistently do not gender both genders.  Some countries defy traditional gender categorizing, including the United States and Canada, which are both more likely to gender indicate male teams for sports when almost every other country does not.

Before going into this analysis deeper, the group “Male – gendered, female – ungendered” never appears.  There were zero matched pairs where a male article contained the word men and the female article did not contain women. There is no systemic bias in terms of article titles that favour women.

This was done using the same list of national team articles.  It mostly relied on pulling article names from the categories for national teams on English Wikipedia. All articles on the resulting list were tagged as either being gendered because they contained the word “men” or “women” in the article title, or being “not gendered” because they did not contain  word “men” or “women” in the article title. Matched pairs of men’s and women’s teams were sought by country. As there is a much larger number of articles about men’s teams and some sports are more female oriented, the number of articles covered was not going to be equal. 836 matching pairs were found for 223 different countries and 28 different sports. The pairs were then labeled “Male – gendered, female – gendered”, “Male – gendered, female – not gendered”, or “Male – not gendered, female – not gendered”.

There were 517 instances of “Male – gendered, female – not gendered”, 200 instances of “Male – gendered, female – gendered”, and 119 instances of “Male – not gendered, female – not gendered”. (All 119 instances of neither gendered are tennis.)  Total, 61% of Wikipedia’s national team articles involve selective gendering favouring men. 29% of the time, selective gendering is not done.

As mentioned previously, this pattern changes from country to country and sport to sport.  In the case of Great Britain, Canada and United States, over 60% of the time, both teams are gender identified.  If we eliminate tennis’s neither gendering, Turkmenistan, Great Britain, Canada, Tiawan, Botswana, Puerto Rico, United States, Philippines, Czech Republic, Egypt, Mexico, and Venezuela all have more than 60% of their genderized pairs both having genderized titles.  The following countries have their matching pairs both being genderized between 50 and 60% of the time: Finland, Serbia, Australia, Croatia, Kazakhstan, Slovakia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Indonesia, and Peru.

Let me be clear: This looks yay! on some level, but it still sucks.  The number should be 100% of matching pairs either both including gender or neither article in a matched pair including gender.  Anything else is selective gendering of a national team article to the neutrality detriment of women.

Beyond country naming patterns, there is the sport naming patterns.  Nine sports genderized both men’s and women’s national team articles 100% of the time.  Those sports are Volleyball, Softball, Squash, Goalball, Lacrosse, Ice hockey, Water polo, Wheelchair basketball, and Australian rules.  This is absolutely fantastic, because the total articles involved are higher per sport than for most countries.  (Inline hockey is also high at 89% and floorball at 83%.  No other sports are above 31%.)  It also suggests the problem with systemic bias against women when it comes to articles titles is probably not entirely dependent on the nation but on the sport and its proponents involved in that sport’s Wikiproject.

But we also have the other side: Most sports have problems in that the selectively genderize women’s national team articles while choosing not to genderize men’s national teams articles.  The following sports have between 0% and 2% of their articles in that group: Handball, Soccer, Cricket, Rugby sevens, International rules, Baseball, Beach handball, Rugby league, Rugby union, Kabaddi, American football, and Bandy.  The remaining sports are field hockey at 30%, basketball at 20% and futsal at 14%.

And this is a problem because the sports that are violating Wikipedia’s neutrality policy by selectively genderizing one team over another to the benefit of promoting the men’s game through article title include 515 articles (total men not gendered, women gendered for sports where this represents 70% or more of the articles) compared to 175 for the first cohort (total men gendered, women gendered where this represents 83% or more of the article count).

None of the sports on the list of genderizing women but not genderizing men particularly surprise me.  These are sports where professionalism is dominated by men, some with high degrees of perceived violence or associated with male norms of masculinity.   By asking Wikipedia to enforce neutrality and stop selectively genderizing some articles, there is an implicit challenge to that male masculinity and male dominance in sport.

And that pattern appears unlikely to change, with Wikipedia selectively gendering those sports because, as I have been told before as a female editor, Wikipedia need not be be neutral and factual but should reflect the cultural norms in which it is written.

In the mean time, I ask that when you read a national team article, you look at the title and critically ask yourself about the gender found in the title.

Women’s national teams are under represented on English Wikipedia compared to men’s teams

Women’s national teams are under represented on English Wikipedia compared to men’s teams.  Of the 260 countries that have one or more national team articles about a country, 36 countries have zero articles about women. 78 countries have 75% to 99% of their articles about men’s national teams.  That accounts for 43% of all countries.

To be fair, some sports have more of an international appeal than others.  Floorball is mostly European.  Handball is European and African.  Netball and cricket are played in Commonwealth countries.  Baseball and softball are more popular in Oceania, Asia and the Americas. Kabaddi is played in Asia.  Some sports are not gender segregated or include requirements for both men and women on the field.  Some national teams are for individual sportspeople, and may include all men, all women or both.  This includes sports like swimming, athletics, badminton, and skiing.  The total number of available sports from country to country is thus unlikely to be equal. At the same time, some sports with national teams and world championships do not have articles about national teams.  Think underwater hockey.

Complicating this analysis, there is the issue that for many countries, there are likely to be more men’s teams than women’s teams for cultural reasons.  Some countries have historically held back against supporting women and their right to participate in sport.  In at least one country, there is a fatwa prohibiting women from participating in soccer.  Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries have historically been opposed to women playing sport.  Some countries have limited resources and opt to spend money on men’s teams instead of women’s teams.  Getting an accurate percentage of men’s versus women’s national teams in the real world is probably near impossible.

In any case, the percentage of women’s national teams articles is low compared to men’s national team articles and the problem is more acute for some countries than others.  The United States has 62 national team articles, 31 for men and 31 for women.  In contrast, Spain has 40 national team articles, 26 for men and 14 for women.

If you’re working on developing content about women’s national teams,

Arabian Gulf, Bonaire, Falkland Islands, Federated Malay States, Federated States of Micronesia, Gibraltar, Guernsey, Female, Isle of Man, Jersey, Kiribati, Kosovo, Leeward Islands, Marshall Islands, Martinique, Mayotte, Monaco, Nauru, Niue, Norfolk Island, North Vietnam, Rhodesia, Saint Helena, Saint Pierre and Miquelon, Saint-Martin, Serbia and Montenegro, South Vietnam, South Yemen, Straits Settlements, Taiwan, Tokelau, Virgin Islands, Wallis and Futuna, West Germany, West Papua, Windward Islands is the list of countries  with zero articles about women’s national teams but articles about men’s national teams.

Countries with 75% to 99% of their national team articles about men’s teams include

Costa Rica, Djibouti, Lithuania, Mauritania, Nepal, Niger, Nigeria, Peru, Rwanda, Senegal, Solomon Islands, South Sudan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Turks and Caicos Islands, West Indies, Iran, Yugoslavia, Chile, El Salvador, Mali, Mauritius, United States Virgin Islands, Uzbekistan, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Burundi, Cyprus, Estonia, Gambia, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, Somalia, Sudan, Suriname, Swaziland, Tuvalu, Cameroon, Iraq, Brunei, Jordan, Malta, Syria, Vanuatu, Israel, American Samoa, Benin, Bhutan, Burkina Faso, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Indonesia, Ivory Coast, Macau, Sierra Leone, Oman , New Caledonia, Pakistan, Laos, Libya, Maldives , San Marino, Timor-Leste, Togo, British Virgin Islands, Gabon, Palestine, Yemen, Morocco, United Arab Emirates, Andorra, Cambodia, Mongolia, Myanmar, Ghana, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Qatar.  Working on creating articles about these countries would also be good.

In some cases, there is a real challenge because as mentioned earlier, many of these countries may not actually have many women’s national teams.  This does not necessarily need to be an impediment.  If there is a large discussion in the media about the team not existing, then the non-existent team may be notable.  This was the case for the Saudi Arabia women’s national football team.  These types of articles can be good because they can bring attention to the plight of women from a feminist perspective.