The Gender Report

The top linked to and discussed articles on the web showed an equal number of male and female bylines in July, the first month that’s happened this year. However, this was coupled with one of the lower showings for female sources.

Since January, we’ve been monitoring the top articles based on links provided in the Project for Excellence in Journalism‘s weekly New Media Index roundups. These chronicle the top five linked to and discussed news stories and opinion pieces around the web in a Monday to Friday week based on commentary on blogs and social media sites. We’ve chosen to focus on the main top five in the blogosphere.

When more than one link was provided on the topic, we’ve monitored the first mentioned or the one that appears based on the writing to be more dominant, unless it is specifically mentioned that two articles shared the attention for that particular subject.

Earlier this month, we released our findings from six month’s worth of monitoring. During that time, women made up 20.2 percent of sources and with 31.3 percent of bylines (of articles by a person or several of one gender or the other, not including shared bylines between a woman and a man).

Female authors surpassed that percentage in July, reaching parity, but women turned up less often as sources. Here’s what we found specifically in the past month:

July 2011

Between July 4 and July 29, the New Media Index included 19 articles that could be checked. Five links were provided for each week, but one week the No. 1 subject on Carmageddon was linked to a page of all of the coverage on the topic and not a specific article.

Here’s what was uncovered:

• Women were 15 percent of sources in this month’s articles. The articles contained 51 male sources and only nine female sources. Thirteen out of the 19 articles contained only male sources.
• This month seven articles were written or produced by men and seven articles were written by women. Two were by both a man or two and a woman and three were not bylined or written by staff.
• Three of the top linked-to articles were opinion pieces. Two were by male authors and one was a shared byline with a man and a woman.

All the links this month except for one came from the LA Times, with the one coming from the BBC.

For past months’ findings as well as other statistics on gender and the online news, visit our findings and statistics page or view our six-month recap of all of our projects and studies here.