>My question is: are the people who are tagging these articles for deletion field experts -- mathematicians or whatever -- who can actually understand the relat

>My question is: are the people who are tagging these articles for deletion field experts -- mathematicians or whatever -- who can actually understand the relative importance of individuals, or are they running through a checklist? If they're just running through a checklist does their checklist just reinforce old stereotypes? For example, old newspapers would not bother interview women engineers, scientists, etc, and even if they were historically women were absolutely kept out of those fields, so even if interviews were random, statistics would ensure low public visibility. Hence relying on the existence of published biographies is not sufficient, and is arguably less relevant than the Erdos number. Exactly, these are the things you need to analyze before making such a claim. If for example we look at other confounding factors and find that these explain most of the variance, then we can discuss why these other factors might be influenced by gender (e.g. less interest from contemporary news publications).