Alessandra Ramos says the discrimination she faces in her native Brazil for being transgender expresses itself in many ways, beginning at the employment line.
When prospective employers learn of her gender, “They say ‘We have this job already marked for someone,’ or, ‘I’m sorry, we will call you back’ and they never call,” says Ramos, speaking by telephone from Rio de Janeiro.
Ramos hopes to change such attitudes this weekend when she joins a global editing effort to increase the online representation of women and minority rights activists around the world. The “edit-a-thon” on May 19 and 20 is a collaboration between Wikipedia, Wikimedia and the London-based rights group Amnesty International.
Organizers say they hope hundreds of online activists representing more than 20 countries will upload biographies of female human rights defenders onto Wikipedia to boost their presence on the internet. The editing effort, called “BRAVE: Edit,” is part of Amnesty’s BRAVE campaign that launched in May 2017, an initiative aimed to boost the recognition and protection of all human rights defenders.
“‘BRAVE: Edit’ hopes to fill this glaring gap,” says Guadalupe Marengo, head of Amnesty International’s Global Human Rights Defenders program. “These are stories of some truly inspirational women who have overcome huge obstacles and fought entrenched discrimination in defense of human rights. Activists from across the globe will be helping to bring them to a worldwide audience where they belong.”
Roughly half of the world’s population has access to the internet, according to Amnesty International. And while Wikipedia says it attracts 1.4 billion unique visits from media each month, Amnesty says only a fraction of the online encyclopedia’s users edit the content.
[ READ: The countries seen as the best for women.]
The majority of the people who frequently edit Wikipedia are usually white, male and either European or North American, according to John Lubbock, a communications coordinator for Wikimedia U.K. Such an editing profile can skew views for a global online audience, he points out in a news release from Amnesty International.
Fewer than 20 percent 0 percent of the biographies on Wikipedia are of women, says Amnesty’s Marengo. Additionally, only 8 percent to 12 percent of the writers and editors on Wikipedia’s English-language content are women, says Linda Steiner, a professor at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland.
The weekend editing effort is aimed at providing a more-diverse representation of people and views that reflects the world, organizers say.
“What the gender gap shows is that world-wide, women often don’t feel that their interests are important (or they are directly told that their interests are unimportant),” Steiner writes in an email. “They are discouraged from contributing (just as women are interrupted more in conversation, quoted less in news articles, used less as opinion writers and columnists and experts). It seems that, across the board, expertise is ‘coded’ as male.”
Brazil is one the first countries where the edit-a-thon will begin this weekend. Ramos, 36, has been an activist campaigning for transgender rights for 18 years. She says she has faced enormous discrimination for being transgendered, but is optimistic the weekend’s global editing initiative “will raise the awareness of the people in Brazil about the rights of the transgender people in Brazil.”
More from U.S. News
Lower Participation in Workforce by Women Limits Economic Growth, Experts Say
These Are the Best 5 Countries for Women
The Americas Report the Most Positive Attitudes Toward LGBT People in Global Survey
Online Edit-a-Thon Aims to Raise Profile of Female Rights Activists Around the World originally appeared on usnews.com
