The Institut Pasteur reports that around 30 volunteer participated in its first-ever Wikipedia edit-a-thon in February, in collaboration with the les sans pagEs project, aiming “to bring the contribution of [women] scientists out of the shadows” by creating and expanding pages about them on French Wikipedia.
The event’s results include two new pages:
- Odile Croissant (1923-2020), French biologist, physicist and electron microscopy specialist.
- Antonina Guelin (1904-1988), French physician and microbiologist.
…as well as 14 pages expanded and six drafts. Check out the full list (in English).
While the volunteers had access to the Institut Pasteur’s archives, they nonetheless came up against a common obstacle: finding reliable sources. “The main reasons for this were the low number of women in the Institut Pasteur’s research laboratories in the first half of the twentieth century, and the structural difficulties women scientists faced in gaining access to positions of responsibility. Between 1952 and 1970, only seven women were heads of departments at the Institut Pasteur (representing between 2% and 6% of all department heads over this period), and it was only in the 1970s that women could become professors.”
Project les sans pagEs describes itself as “born of the need to bridge the gender gap and bias on Wikipedia.” In 2016, according to the project, Wikipedia in French had 450,000 biographies of men, compared to 75,000 of women (16.6% of the total). Today those counts stand at 585,813 and 149,479 respectively — a ratio of about one biography of a woman for every five of a man.
Just like Women Do News, les sans pagEs was inspired by the Anglophone projects Women in Red and Art + Feminism. There are several more 2025 events on their schedule for Lausanne, Paris and online.