27/03/2026
NWHG is part of the Women in red project updating Wikipedia with information on or pages about various Nottingham women.
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Sandi Toksvig has spent most of her career saying things other people were thinking but hadn't quite got round to saying. Between the Stops, published in 2019, is structured around her bus commute through London, a deliberately ordinary frame for observations that turn out to be political. She co-founded the Women's Equality Party in 2015, and that political background runs through the book.
The facts she's describing are straightforward, and the straightforwardness is the point. Donna Strickland, a physicist who would go on to win the Nobel Prize for her work on laser pulses, was rejected by Wikipedia's editors as insufficiently notable. The entry submitted on her behalf was declined. She was, apparently, not enough. Then she won the Nobel Prize, and she became enough, on the same day. The question Toksvig asks, whether that can really be what it takes to be remembered, is not rhetorical in the way such questions usually are. She means it literally. She wants someone to answer.
What she's identifying is a system working as it was trained to work. Wikipedia relies on volunteer editors and on existing published coverage to determine notability. Women have historically received less coverage in newspapers, fewer profiles, and fewer interviews. So when a woman's Wikipedia entry is assessed against that standard, the absence of coverage becomes evidence of insignificance, rather than evidence of how coverage has worked. The gap reproduces itself. The women who didn't get written about don't get written about again, and the record confirms what the record had already decided.
Caroline Criado Perez spent years documenting precisely this kind of loop in Invisible Women, published in 2019. Data about women is missing because it was never collected. Policies are built on incomplete data and women fall through the gaps that their own absence created. Toksvig and Criado Perez are describing the same mechanism from different angles, and the most revealing thing is how unremarkable the mechanism looks from the inside.
And that's where it stops being a structural argument and becomes a personal one. A woman reading the story of Strickland's entry being rejected might feel a quick flash of anger and then, if she's honest with herself, something closer to recognition. Most women who've worked in professional environments know what it's like to need their credentials checked twice, to need their recommendations to be warmer and more detailed than a man's to carry the same weight, to be told they're not quite ready for a promotion they've already been doing the work for. The standard Toksvig describes isn't only on Wikipedia. It lives in performance reviews and funding applications and editorial decisions and hiring panels. The Nobel Prize just made it visible because the Nobel Prize is hard to argue with, and even then it took a day.
No man is held to such a standard. Toksvig writes that with a plainness that should make a reader pause. Because when a woman reads that sentence and doesn't immediately feel surprised, that tells her something about what she's absorbed over the years. The absence of surprise is almost more telling than the anger. A woman who shrugs at that sentence has already, somewhere, accepted it as a condition of how things go. And the acceptance is the result of living inside a system long enough that the system stops feeling like a system and starts feeling like reality. Knowing that doesn't make it easier to reverse. Recognition and change are not the same thing, and the distance between them is where most women spend a great deal of their time.
© Echoes of Women - Fiona.F, 2026. All rights reserved
Image: Amnesty International UK, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
