Year: 2011

The debate: Is Newsweek’s cover of Michele Bachmann sexist?

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It’s been all the “rage” across media platforms this week: Is this Newsweek cover of GOP presidential candidate Michele Bachmann sexist?

As soon as Newsweek posted this TwitPic of the week's cover Aug. 7, the debate began over whether the image of Michele Bachmann is sexist.

The cover (right) features a close-up of a wide-eyed Bachmann with the headline “QUEEN OF RAGE” that some are saying makes her look “crazy.” The accompanying story has received far less attention.

This isn’t the first time Newsweek has come under fire for its cover of a female politician. Many on both sides have drawn comparisons to a cover of Sarah Palin in running shorts two years ago that was deemed “sexist.” (This also isn’t the first time charges of sexism toward Bachmann have come up in campaign coverage and its not likely to be the last.)

Conservative commentators, like Michelle Malkin, have said the image shows the mainstream media’s liberal bias and have particularly called into question the treatment of conservative women.

Jessica Grose at Slate’s XX Factor said the cover was “unnecessarily unflattering” and pulled out past covers of Republican male candidates that were done using a serious tone (though these were before current editor Tina Brown took over the magazine, as was the Palin cover). Jon Stewart made a similar criticism of Newsweek’s cover photo during “The Daily Show” this week, noting “…Here’s what you can’t say about Michele Bachmann: That she is not photogenic.” (Watch the video here).

The National Organization for Women spoke out against the cover through the Daily Caller. From NOW President Terry O’Neill:

“It’s sexist… Casting her in that expression and then adding ‘The Queen of Rage’ I think [it is]. Gloria Steinem has a very simple test: If this were done to a man or would it ever be done to a man – has it ever been done to a man? Surely this has never been done to a man.”

Gloria Steinem herself has called the photo “borderline.”

Others, like Joan Walsh, have said Brown has “nothing to apologize for.” She points to the fact that there are plenty of shots of “a deranged-looking” George W. Bush, John McCain and Howard Dean that have cropped up in the past. She also linked to a piece from 2006 with what she called “crazy-scary” cover images of Al Gore and Sen. Mark Warner.

As for Newsweek, Brown responded by defending the cover and releasing outtakes from the shoot to show the other options the magazine had and that display a “similar intensity.” In a statement, Brown said, “Michele Bachmann’s intensity is galvanizing voters in Iowa right now and Newsweek’s cover captures that.”

Bachmann herself has for the most part shrugged off questions about the cover by saying, “I didn’t pay a lot of attention to it really.”

What do you think? Is the cover sexist? Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

This is the Gender Report’s Week in Review, a weekly post that highlights some of the major stories related to gender issues this week. Some of these stories may have already appeared in our News Feed or in the week’s Gender Checks. We’ll at times include a longer analysis of stories as well as bring attention to stories that may have slipped through the cracks of the week’s news cycle.

Gender Check breakdown: A look at female authors, sources by article subject

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Is there a difference in the representation of women as sources and authors based on the subject of the article?

This is a question we’d been asking ourselves. We did look at the issue of coverage type when we examined the number of female principal staff members for online news sites through the Columbia Journalism Review’s News Frontier Database and found differences, but we’d yet to address it through our article monitoring.

Since marking six months of our Gender Check monitoring project and releasing our initial findings at the end of July, we’ve had a chance to spend some more time with our data and look at it from different angles, including this one.

We went back through our findings and looked at each of the 190 article we gender checked by topic. To have a basis of comparison as well as a some-what standardized approach, we opted to use (to the best of our ability) the Global Media Monitoring Project‘s news stories classification system (Click for a PDF of the system). This system divides articles into eight categories with a numbering system for further breakdowns within each category. Due to the number of articles in our sample at this time, we’ve opted just to look at the representation of women in each of the main categories, though we hope to look at further divisions in the future. None of our articles fell under the categories of “Other” and ‘The Girl-Child,” so we’ll just be sticking to the six remaining categories.

In terms of the subject classification of the articles we monitored in the first six months of our Gender Check project, the largest number fell under “Crime and Violence” (62 out of 190). That was followed by “Politics and Government” (41), “Economy” (38), “Social and Legal” (24), “Science and Health” (16) and “Celebrity, Arts, Media and Sports” (9).

Within those categories, here’s what we found:

Sourcing

The classification with the lowest percentage of female sources was “Social and Legal” at 19.8 percent followed closely by “Politics and Government” at 20.2 percent. The highest percentage of female sources went to “Science and Health” at 30.4 percent.

Here’s the breakdown by classification:

  • Politics and Government: 142 males, 36 females (Women as 20.2 percent)
  • Economy: 100 males, 34 females (Women as 25.4 percent)
  • Science and Health: 55 males, 24 females (Women as 30.4 percent)
  • Social and Legal: 73 males, 18 females (Women as 19.8 percent)
  • Crime and Violence: 180 males, 73 females (Women as 28.9 percent)
  • Celebrity, Arts, Media and Sports: 22 males, 9 females (Women as 29 percent)

Authorship

Even though they had the highest percentage of female sources, “Science and Health” articles did not fair well when it came to female bylines. Articles in this classification had the lowest percentage of female authors at 25 percent. The closest to byline parity was in “Economy” where females made up 44.7 percent of authors.

Here’s how it separated out by classification:

  • Politics and Government: 15 stories by women, 23 by men, 3 shared bylines between a man and a woman (Women as 36.6 percent)
  • Economy: 17 by women, 21 by men (Women as 44.7 percent)
  • Science and Health: 4 by women, 11 by men, 1 shared (Women as 25 percent)
  • Social and Legal: 9 by women, 13 by men, 2 shared (Women as 37.5 percent)
  • Crime and Violence: 18 by women, 35 by men, 8 shared, 1 by contributors (Women as 29 percent)
  • Celebrity, Arts, Media and Sports: 3 by women, 6 by men (Women as 33.3 percent)

We’ll be continuing to watch for trends that emerge in subject areas over time as our study progresses. We’d like to hear from you. What did you find most interesting or surprising about these results? What are you curious to know?

For more information on gender representations in online news, check out our “Findings and Statistics” and “Useful Resources” pages.

Gender check: 8/11/11 – Midwest

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*Gender Checks are quick examinations of gender representation in individual news articles for the purpose of discovering trends over time. Click here to read more.

Website: St. Louis Post-Dispatch(stltoday.com)

"Congressional pages from St. Louis area lament passing of the program" - Stltoday.com, 8/11/2011

On Stltoday.com, one of the lead articles featured on the home page as of 10:15 a.m. (PDT) Thursday, Aug. 11, was titled “Congressional pages from St. Louis area lament passing of the program.” Its subject was the end of the U.S. House of Representatives’ page program.

Here is its gender breakdown:

–Author: Male

–Human sources (listed in order mentioned):

  1. Male, house page
  2. Female, widow of former U.S. representative (later noted then she succeeded him)
  3. Male, U.S. representative
  4. Male, first appointed African-American page
  5. Female, former page (college junior)
  6. Female, page (high school junior)
  7. Male, page (high school senior)


Website: St. Louis Beacon

On the St. Louis Beacon, one of the lead articles featured on the home page as of 10:15 a.m. (PDT) Thursday, Aug. 11, was titled “A year out, political attacks focus on image — not issues.” Its subject was election campaigns and attacks on the images of candidate and incumbents.

Here is its gender breakdown:

–Author: Female

–Human sources  (listed in order mentioned):

  1. Unknown, top local party official
  2. Male, political science professor
  3. Female, U.S. senator
  4. Male, U.S. representative
  5. Male, unnamed spokesman for lieutenant governor
  6. Male, unnamed spokesman for St. Louis business man (potential candidate)

Notes/analysis: The story also included quotes from releases from political groups.

Report Your Thoughts: Where are the women? (Part 1)

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Editor’s note: Our findings through our monitoring projects have served to identify and bring attention to the fact that women’s voices are missing, but have left us with more questions than answers. That’s why we’re taking our project a step further by starting a discussion on why this is the case and what can be done about it. This is part of a series of posts each week aiming to start a discussion on gender representations in online news. View past “Report Your Thoughts” discussions here.

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Question 1: Where are the women (in bylines and in the newsroom)?

We’d like to start off our discussions with the most basic question about our findings: Why? Why are women present in such low numbers in our byline counts of lead articles as well as our looks inside newsrooms?

Since the late 1970s, women have made up the majority of college journalism majors, but that has yet to transfer over to the industry itself.

Here are some facts:

– The American Society of News Editors’ 2011 Newsroom Census found that women made up 36.9 percent of those working full time at daily U.S. newspapers. That percentage has fluctuated only slightly since the study began in 1999.

-The Global Media Monitoring Project (2010) found that overall in a study of media platforms from 100 countries that 37 percent of stories were reported by women. That percentage was 36 percent in the monitoring of online news sites from 16 countries.

-At the six-month mark, we’ve found that women wrote 37.7 percent of the lead articles on the online news sites in our Gender Check study if articles with no bylines and those with shared bylines between a man and a woman are taken out of the equation, but 34.7 percent when those are included. Among the top discussed and linked to articles around the web via the New Media Index, they bylined 31.3 percent of articles by authors or one gender or the author and only 26.3 percent overall in the first six months of 2011. In our look at the principal staff members of online-only news sites in the News Frontier Database, we discovered that women hold only 28 percent of these positions.

There have been many reasons and factors associated with this absence of women from newsrooms and among lead bylines, but we want to hear from you. What do you make of these findings. Why is this the case? If you are a woman with a background or training in journalism but are not currently working in the field, we want to know your story.

We invite you to share your thoughts as well as any personal stories here in the comment section as well as on Twitter with the hashtag #GRdiscuss or on our Facebook discussion board.

So, where are the women?

Update: We’ll also note that the International Women’s Media Foundation’s  “The Global Report on the Status of Women in the News Media”  that came out in March uncovered similar trends in its look at nearly 60 countries and more than 500 companies (Read our past post on this study here). The study found that 73 percent of the top management jobs were occupied by men. Overall, women held 36 percent of reporter positions.

Update 2: Much of the discussion for this week’s question took place on Twitter using the hashtag #GRdiscuss. A few people and groups participated by sharing their thoughts on the question as well as comments and links on women’s representation in the media in general. Many more retweeted parts of the discussion.

The most retweeted was one of my own comments on the subject:

Here’s a sample of some of the other highlights:

To view more tweets in the discussion, search the #GRdiscuss hashtag on Twitter. You can still join the discussion and share your thoughts by commenting below.

Getting the discussion started: Gender representations in online news

Jasmine R. LinabaryLeave a comment

Is your voice being represented in the news? Odds are, if you’re a woman, probably not. Women make up 50.7 percent of the U.S. population, according to the most recent census, but when it comes to representation in the news they are present in much lower numbers.

The presence of women is what we’ve been attempting to calculate here at The Gender Report, particularly when it comes to the emergent platform of online news. Thus far, we’ve found that among lead articles on online news sites, both those associated with a newspaper and those that are online-only, women make up only 25.3 percent of sources. That percentage drops lower when we look at the most linked to and discussed articles of the web in the New Media Index in which women are only 20.2 percent of sources.

And, when it comes to producing online news, women haven’t reached parity there either. Our counts have found that once articles with no bylines and those with shared bylines between a man and a woman are taken out of the equation, women wrote 37.7 percent of the lead articles on the online news sites in our study. Of the top articles around the web, they bylined 31.3 percent. They are also absent among the principal staff members of online-only news sites, filling 28 percent of these positions, based on our look at the News Frontier Database.

These numbers, while serving to identify and bring attention to the fact that women’s voices are missing, present us with more questions than answers. That’s why we’d like to take our project a step further by starting a discussion on why this is the case and what can be done about it.

For the next several weeks, we’ll be posting discussion questions here on our website with the tag “Report Your Thoughts” as well as through Facebook and Twitter (using the hashtag #GRdiscuss). We hope you’ll get involved by sharing your thoughts and comments on questions like: Where are the women? Why does it matter? What’s the solution? And who’s working toward change?

Join us in this conversation. Let’s get the discussion started.