Our culture has a glaring tendency to elevate the achievements of men over the achievements of women. In fact, according to Jami Mathewson, Educational Partnerships Manager at Wiki Education, only about 17.5 percent of biographies on Wikipedia are of women.

“There are so many notable women whose contributions to the world are missing,” Mathewson told Her Campus. “Wikipedia is read by almost 500 million people every single month, and that’s a really big number. It’s the first result on Google, or on any search.”

Wikipedia is a created and edited by volunteers across the world, meaning that it’s fairly easy for anyone to create a biography about a notable woman. So why does Wikipedia hold such a blatant gender discrepancy when it comes to representation? Well, according to Mathewson, about 80 percent of volunteer editors on Wikipedia are male.

“We really see that reflected in the content,” she said.

Driven by a cohort of over 33 million volunteer editors, Wikipedia’s content can change in almost real time. That makes it a prime resource for current events, popular culture, sports and other evolving topics.

But relying on volunteers leads to systemic biases – both in content creation and improvement. A 2013 study estimated that women only accounted for 16.1 percent of Wikipedia’s total editor base. Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales believes that number has not changed much since then, despite several organized efforts.

If women don’t actively edit Wikipedia at the same rate as men, topics of interest to women are at risk of receiving disproportionately low coverage. One study found that Wikipedia’s coverage of women was more comprehensive than Encyclopaedia Britannica online, but entries on women still constituted less than 30 percent of biographical coverage. Entries on women also more frequently link to entries on men than vice-versa and are more likely to include information on romantic relationships and family roles.

What’s more, Wikipedia’s policies state that all content must be “attributable to a reliable, published source.” Since women throughout history have been less represented in published literature than men, it can be challenging to find reliable published sources on women.

An obituary in a paper of record is often a criterion for inclusion as a biographical entry in Wikipedia. So, it should be no surprise that women are underrepresented as subjects in this vast online encyclopaedia. As The New York Times itself noted, its obituaries since 1851 “have been dominated by white men” – an oversight the paper now hopes to address through its “Overlooked” series.

The solution to systemic biases that plague the web remains unclear. But libraries, museums, individual editors and the Wikimedia Foundation itself continue to make efforts to improve gender representation on sites such as Wikipedia.

Organized edit-a-thons can create a community around editing and developing underrepresented content. Edit-a-thons aim to increase the number of active female editors on Wikipedia, while empowering participants to edit entries on women during the event and into the future.