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 Intersection of Profession, Religion and Gender on Wikipedia 

Hi BHG, I'm posting this to you because I noticed you participated in an old series of CfD discussions and are familiar with it.

In the process of reviewing the situation involving the various articles on Islamic scholarship Islamic mathematics, Islamic science, Islamic metaphysics etc.  which have been subject to extensive edit-warring and outright deletion or stubbing in the case of some articles by two groups of editors broadly labeled Islamophiles and anti-Revisionists  a third group of people who might be termed Irrelevantists as they were unfamiliar with the subject and considered it non-notable due to religious content (which the anti-revisionist history buffs do not; they merely are vehemently against anything in the article that smacked of promotion) referred folks to the old discussions that led to the deletion of the ""Professionals by religion"" Category, e.g. CfD:Astronomers by religion and CfD:Mathematicians by religion.

The vast consensus of those two discussions were that religion was utterly irrelevant to the personal or professional life of those professionals and even asked ""when would it end?"" Much cracks were had about how religion was once relevant to scientists' lives but is now a historical curiosity. However the discussion boiled down to it being a non-intersecting and ""frankly absurd"" means of categorizing people.

What I find interesting is that the same policies could be provided for Category:Women by occupation and yet no one has ever proposed deletion of that entire (huge) category tree, and in fact insisted on the exact opposite arguments, despite the fact that some women actively do object to being labeled as a ""Woman scientist"", whereas no astronomer has ever objected to being labeled religious despite the disingenuous claim made in the above CfD. 

(Caveat: The only deletion ever proposed for the gender categories that I can see is that ""Women"" is non-grammatical, which I disagree with  it sounds better than ""Female"" and is commonly used even in cases where it is a neologism, such as ""women earth scientists"" - grammatical but ridiculous)  the latter is a prime case of what I'm talking about. If it had been ""Muslim earth scientists"" or another religion, it would have been deleted ""with extreme prejudice"" and some vitriol by ""science vs. religion"" types. But the rationale used would have been that it was non-intersecting and an article couldn't be written about it, which seems to be being selectively applied by Brightists on this site. (Some of these categories, an article could be written but that doesn't mean a category should exist, as one person on the ""Female"" CfD noted. Especially since the women-in-science movement is very divided about whether women professionals should be categorized as such.) 

Full disclosure: a close family member is both a woman scientist and the past president of a graduate women in science professional organization, so no bias here.   "