Sally Kenney, Newcomb-Tulane College professor and author, presented her lecture “Where are the Women? Preventing the erasure of women judges through Wikipedia” at the Memorial Union Wednesday.
Kenney teaches in political science, Africana Studies, law and global health and behavioral science. She is the author of “Gender and Justice: Why Women in the Judiciary Really Matter” and of “For Whose Protection?: Reproductive Hazards and Exclusionary Policies in the United States and Britain.”
Kenney has done extensive research on women judges, and one of the main problems that she has come across in her research is that there is not much history kept on women judges. Kenney often finds Wikipedia pages about women judges that have very little information.
“Over the past 40 years, I’ve worked on equality in general and done a lot of work on women judges, and just as women academics are finally getting their place at the table, being published in mainstream journals, creating their own specialized journals and gaining a toehold in university presses, these sources have become increasingly irrelevant and unavailable to scholars around the world [who] can’t afford to breach their payrolls [obtaining resources],” Kenney said.
Once Kenney found this, she sought to write her own additions to Wikipedia about the women judges that she had researched.
However, Wikipedia has some rules about who can write and edit its pages. Since Kenney had done extensive research on these topics, she was not allowed to write about them on their website.
“Although many academics curl their lips and openly discourage students from consulting it, Wikipedia is the go-to for information for scholarly research and for arguing with one’s spouse,” Kenney said. “Wikipedia is the largest and most widely used encyclopedia in history.”
While building the different pages about women judges, Kenney found that a lot of her work would get taken down and changed. She wondered how narratives about women like the judges she researched are impacted by this.
“Nine percent of Wikipedia editors are women, and the largest group of entries are by men and deal with warfare,” Kenney said. “Fewer than five percent of super users, that is, every person who has more than five edits, are women; most are men, coders and gamers. The kind of techies living in their mom’s basements and surfing all hours on incel chat lines.”
Kenney co-founded The Infinity Project, which hopes to expand public awareness of the lack of gender equality on the bench. Kenney showed several different images of benches of judges; all images had little to no women on them.
In the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, which covers seven states including Iowa, only two women have ever been appointed. Diana Murphy was appointed in 1994 and served until her death in 2018, and Jane Kelly, appointed in 2013, is still serving today.
“Not only do I want to prevent another season of silence, but it has always been a pleasure to honor a situated woman trailblazer who cleared paths and inspired me,” Kenney said. “I want to make sure that the hard work that I do with information about women judges will benefit future scholars who will not end until we gain better footing.”
Although it may seem unconventional, Wikipedia can be one way to preserve women’s history and accomplishments.
“We all have to be vigilant and make sure that the pages have been created and not actually completed or changed beyond recognition,” Kenney said.
Kenney runs a podcast called Deconstructing Rape and is a co-chair for Survivor Impact, where they work to eliminate the statute of limitations for filing civil actions for child sex abuse.
To learn more about upcoming lectures, visit the ISU Lecture Programs website.