Heliyon
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The UK Online Gender Audit 2018: A comprehensive audit of gender within the UK's online environment.
Gender inequality has exploded as a recent issue within mainstream media across US and UK cultural commentary. High-profile scandals of sexual harassment and gender pay differences have focused attention on the on-going disparity between sexes and political status. This paper presents a novel experiment in the application of so-called "big data" to analyse gender inequality. ⋯ The procedure scans over 200 million web pages, and harvests 157,032 organisations and over 2.3 million people. The results reveal material bias (60%+) towards the representation of men over the majority of economic sectors, and across representation of power and status within job roles and professional titles. The experiment highlights not only new levels of gender bias but also the use of the Internet as a valuable source of plentiful data for social and economic analysis.