Fast Facts

Gary Pattillo is reference librarian at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, e-mail: pattillo@email.unc.edu

Wikipedia gender gap

Various studies have been carried out in order to determine the gender percentages of contributors to Wikipedia content. Estimates of total female Wikipedia editors range from 8.5 percent (Wikimedia Foundation, 2011) to 16 percent (MIT/Northwestern, 2013). Estimates also varied by country, e.g., India (3 percent) and the United States (14 percent).

Saskia Ehlers, “Gender Imbalance on Wikipedia—an Insider’s Perspective,” Wikimedia.org, January 15, 2018. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ehlers_Wikipedia_Gender_Gap.pdf (retrieved October 10, 2018).

Homework gap

“School-age children in lower-income households are especially likely to lack broadband access. Roughly one-third of households with children ages 6 to 17 and whose annual income falls below $30,000 a year do not have a high-speed [I]nternet connection at home, compared with just 6 percent of such households earning $75,000 or more a year. Overall, 17 percent of teens say they are often or sometimes unable to complete homework assignments because they do not have reliable access to a computer or [I]nternet connection.”

Monica Anderson and Andrew Perrin, “Nearly One-in-Five Teens Can’t Always Finish Their Homework Because of the Digital Divide,” Pew Research Center (blog), www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/10/26/nearly-one-in-five-teens-cant-always-finish-their-homework-because-of-the-digital-divide (retrieved December 4, 2018).

News platform preferences

“Overall, 47 percent of Americans prefer watching the news (on TV and the web) rather than reading or listening to it. That is unchanged from 46 percent in 2016 and outpaces the 34 percent who prefer to read the news and 19 percent who prefer to listen to it. Just over four-in-ten U.S. adults prefer TV, compared with about a third who prefer the web, 14 percent who prefer radio, and 7 percent who prefer print.”

Amy Mitchell, “Americans Still Prefer Watching to Reading the News—and Mostly Still Through Television,” Pew Research Center, December 3, 2018, www.journalism.org/2018/12/03/americans-still-prefer-watching-to-reading-the-news-and-mostly-still-through-television (retrieved December 4, 2018).

History majors

“Since the economic crisis of 2008 . . . of all the major disciplines, history has seen the steepest declines in the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded. In 2008, the National Center for Education Statistics reported 34,642 majors in history; in 2017, the most recent year for which data are available, the number was 24,266. Between 2016 and 2017, the number of history majors fell by over 1,500. Even as university enrollments have grown, history has seen its raw numbers erode heavily.”

Benjamin M. Schmidt, “The History BA since the Great Recession,” Perspectives on History, November 26, 2018, https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/december-2018/the-history-ba-since-the-great-recession-the-2018-aha-majors-report (retrieved December 4, 2018).

Postsecondary graduation rates

“Approximately 60 percent of full-time, first-time students at 4-year institutions in 2011 who were seeking a bachelor’s or equivalent degree completed a bachelor’s or equivalent degree within 6 years at the institution where they began their studies.

Scott A. Ginder, Janice E. Kelly-Reid, and Farrah B. Mann, Graduation Rates for Selected Cohorts, 2009–14; Outcome Measures for Cohort Year 2009–10; Student Financial Aid, Academic Year 2016–17; and Admissions in Postsecondary Institutions, Fall 2017: First Look (Provisional Data) (NCES 2018-151), December 2018. U.S. Department of Education. Washington, DC: National Center for Education Statistics. https://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2018151 (retrieved December 4, 2018).