Year: 2011

Gender Check 5/25/11- Northeast

Joy BaconLeave a comment
*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: The New York Times

On The New York Times, one of the lead articles featured on the home page as of 8:30 a.m. EST on Wednesday, May 25 was titled “G.O.P on the Defensive as Voters Resist Medicare Plan.” Its subject was an analysis of the plan to reduce Medicare to reduce government spending.

Here is its gender breakdown:

–Author: Female

–Human sources  (listed in order mentioned):

1. Male – spokesman

2. Male – U.S. senator

3. Male – U.S. senator

Notes/analysis: The majority of this story was compiled from previous statements, votes or positions from Congress as well as published statements from interest groups. Several male and female representatives are named but not directly quoted.

Website: ProPublica

On ProPublica, one of the lead articles featured on the home page as of 8:30 a.m. EST on Wednesday, May 25 was titled “Witness: Pakistani Intel Officer Ordered Hit on Mumbai Jews.” Its subject was an investigation into an attack on a Jewish center in 2008. The story was written in conjunction with a PBS Frontline investigation, and a version also appeared in the Washington Post.

Here is its gender breakdown:

–Author: Male

–Human sources  (listed in order mentioned):

1. Male – Pakistani terrorist (self-described term)

2. Male – author

3. Male – Pakistani major

Gender check: 5/24/11 – West

Jasmine R. LinabaryLeave a comment

*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: Seattle Times

On the Seattle Times, one of the lead articles featured on the home page as of 11:20 a.m. (PST) Tuesday, May 24, was titled “1.9% teacher pay cut: Lawmakers strike budget deal.” Its subject was a plan for pay cuts in education announced.

Here is its gender breakdown:

–Author: Male

–Human sources  (listed in order mentioned):

1. Male, committee chairman

Notes/analysis: The article mostly detailed the budget agreement, without much comment at this time from lawmakers and none yet from those affected.


Website: Seattle P-I

On the Seattle P-I, one of the lead articles featured on the home page as of 11: 20 a.m. (PST) Tuesday, May 24, was titled “Surveyor beat down two would-be thieves, prosecutors claim.” Its subject was two men being charged for attempting to steal a GPS receiver, though the male owner chased them down and “beat them down.”

Here is its gender breakdown:

–Author: Male

–Human sources  (listed in order mentioned):

1. Male, detective

Examining gender representations in the New Media Index

Jasmine R. LinabaryLeave a comment

Here at The Gender Report, we’ve been wondering: Of the most talked about articles on the web, how many feature women? How many are produced by females?

In addition to our monthly (and quarterly) roundups of our findings on gender representation in online news through our Gender Checks, we’ve been seeking other ways to examine these issues.

The Project for Excellence in Journalism‘s weekly New Media Index gave us a way to try to answer those questions. The New Media Index chronicles the top five linked to and discussed news stories and opinion pieces around the web in a Monday through Friday week based on leading commentary on blogs and social media sites.

Starting with the first week of the year, The Gender Report has pulled a Gender Check on each of the top articles based on the links PEJ provides in addition to our geographical checks each week. We chose to focus on the main top five in the blogosphere and not that just for Twitter or YouTube. When more than one link was provided on the subject, we’ve selected the first mentioned or that which appears based on the writing as more dominant, unless it is specifically mentioned that two articles shared the glory for that subject, in which case we checked both. It’s noteworthy that the vast majority of the links PEJ provides come from either the Washington Post or the LA Times with occasional appearances by the BBC. Other news sources are rarely used as the link article.

From these articles and posts, we’ve been recording the subject matter, the gender of the authors or creators, and the source breakdown by gender. This first post on these checks provides a round-up of the first four months of the year. In the future, we’ll be sharing them on a monthly basis.

Overall, the four-month span had these findings:

  • Approximately 21.5 percent of sources in were women. Of those whose gender could be identified, the articles contained 55 female sources and 201 male sources.
  • One or more woman authored 21 of the articles, while a man or multiple bylined 46. Four had a shared byline between a man (or men) and a woman. Also interesting, of the op-ed pieces that made their way to the weekly top five, two were by women and five were by men. One was a staff editorial.

Here are the findings by month:

January 2011

For the month of January, with weeks starting Jan. 3 through that ending Jan. 28, these were our results.

In that time, there were 23 articles referenced at a rate of the top five per week. One week had two at No. 5. One article (a video interview with Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer) repeated in the top five two weeks in a row, so these numbers only count it once. For one subject, the shooting in Tuscon, Ariz., no link to a specific individual article was provided. Another link, that for the subject of violence in Zimbabwe, was dead.

Here’s the gender breakdown:

  • Overall, there were 37 male sources and 10 female sources referenced in these articles during the month of January. That made women 21.3 percent of sources.
  • Of the authors or creators that could be identified by gender, 12 were male and six were female. One article had a shared byline with a man and a woman. Four had no byline.

In addition to those statistics, it was also noteworthy this month that while eight articles explicitly were about male subjects, only one was specifically about a female subject. The single article about a woman, which occurred in the first week of the month, was regarding the death of actress Anne Francis, whose obituary (the link provided) cites her most-remembered role as that of “Honey West” in a 1960s TV series about a “sexy female private detective.” She’s also described as a “shapely blond with a beauty mark next to her lower lip.”

This is a trend that carried throughout the months. More articles appeared in the top five about male subjects for any number of reasons (like this fun one on a 103-year-old male cyclist). Articles on female subjects usually made it around the blogosphere when an actress died, like Francis, and later Elizabeth Taylor.

February 2011

Between Jan. 31 and Feb. 25, these were the findings. There were 14 articles, with two No. 1’s one week. In subsequent weeks when Egypt and then Libya were the No. 2 story, the PEJ roundups did not include a link to an article.

Here’s the breakdown:

  • This month women made up 28 percent of sources. The articles included 41 males sources and 16 female sources.
  • In February seven articles were written or produced by one or more male, five were by females and one was by both a man and a woman. One article had no byline.

March 2011

For the weeks that began Feb. 28 and ended April 1, a total of 23 subject articles or links were provided at the top-five-per-week rate. This month saw much more tying among subjects in terms of their percentage of the links referenced in the blogosphere. Two links were either not provided and couldn’t be externally identified or were no longer functioning.

The breakdown was as follows for the month:

  • In the low of the first four months, women made up only 15.2 percent of sources. Of sources that could be gender identified, just 14 were female while 78 were male.
  • Six articles were written by a woman, 15 by a man, three by two or more men and one with a shared byline with a man and a woman. One had no byline.

April 2011

Starting with the week of April 4 and ending April 22, a total of 17 articles were referenced. It appears that no New Media Index was completed for the week of April 25 to 29, at least not that we could find. Both the second and third week had six articles, as two articles shared the No. 2 spot for economy during the second week and the fourth week saw two subjects sharing No. 1 and No. 4 (with no No. 5).

Here’s what the month brought:

  • Approximately 25 percent of sources were women in April. A total of 15 sources were female and 45 were male.
  • On the byline front, four articles were by one or more woman, 10 were by a man and two had shared bylines between a woman and one or more man. Again, one article had no byline.

Looking at the New Media Index is again one of several ways we’ll be examining the issues of gender representations in both the coverage and creation of online news. For some context or a basis of comparison for these statistics, read our earlier post on the statistics found in the 2010 Global Media Monitoring Project’s report. For more information or research on women’s representation in the news media, check out our “Useful Resources” page.

Political spouses play increased role in candidacy, fallout from misconduct

Joy BaconLeave a comment

Several stories this week have centered around the role of spouses in political races and scandals. And by spouses, in every case we are looking at the wife of a male politician, although several stories note the discrepancy that would most likely exist if a female candidate’s male spouse was examined in a similar light.

Presidential Candidates

As the primary season for 2012 approaches, several GOP candidates have been thrown, or voluntarily placed themselves, in the spotlight as a contender for the nomination. Roughly half of voters said a candidate’s spouse would have some impact on their vote, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll just before the start of the 2008 presidential primaries. However, some of these spouses have been reluctant to undergo the scrutiny of a campaign.  Most prominent in the discussion is Cheri Daniels, wife of Gov. Mitch Daniels, who was described in Newsweek as hesitant about a potential  campaign due to anxiety of her “personal life getting shredded like a chunk of ripe Parmesan.” The New York Times’ weekly Room for Debate tackled this tension of public vs. private life, with several contributors falling on different points of the spectrum.

Also in the spotlight this week was Callista Gingrich, third wife of declared primary candidate Newt Gingrich. His marital past is being discussed in the Boston Globe and across multiple media outlets as a potential stumbling block to his campaign, especially as he tries to cater to voters who prioritize family values issues. Richard Reeves for the Times’ Room for Debate wrote that “Gingrich’s trio of marriages may prove to be a test as to how far we have come since a single divorce could derail a political career.”

Again, it is noticeable that these types of anxieties, and the news cycles that debate them, are focused on the wives, not husbands, of candidates. Newsweek noted that “the life of a presidential wife is all about contorting herself to satisfy the constant, constantly shifting demands of a nation that still can’t decide what it wants from the role.” Maybe husbands are left out of the debate for the time being because the types of trip ups a candidate’s wife can be seen to cause are just shifted to female candidates themselves.

The primary candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton in 2008, faced her own share of gender-based criticism while the marital mistakes of former President Bill Clinton were not widely discussed as a hindrance to her image surrounding family values, although their marital history was fare game during his 1992 campaign for the same office. Politico all but counted female candidates out of the 2012 Republican primary, saying this week they are either “provocative but unelectable and provocative but who may render their husbands unelectable.”

Political Mistakes

Two other political figures this week brought attention to their spouses. The separation of former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger from his wife Maria Shriver brought light to his child born to a former employee of the family 10 years ago. During his campaign for governor, Shriver repeatedly defended her husband of 25 years when accusations surfaced of his misconduct and sexual harrassment of women on his movie sets and elsewhere. Tracy Weber, now of ProPublica, described her reporting of Schwarzenegger’s misconduct for the LA Times, saying Shriver “battled back forcefully, contributing in large part to his victory.”

On the other side of the country,  former chief of the International Monetary Fund Dominique Strauss-Kahn faces charges of attempted rape of a housekeeper in a New York City hotel. His wife, Anne Sinclair, was described in the New York Times as “the driving force for (his) political ambitions.” Like Shriver, Sinclair was a TV journalist who gave up her career to avoid conflict of interest with her husband’s political aspirations.

And while the coverage of Strauss-Kahn case raises several issues around the coverage of rape and depictions of victims of sexual assault, the larger issue comes down to the role these incidents will play out for these men’s political futures, and the portrayal of their wives’ responses.

Both Shriver and Sinclair unfortunately have several examples to choose from. Jenny Sanford, former first lady of South Carolina, made headlines for her refusal to stand by her husband after his affair with an Argentinian woman. When former President Bill Clinton apologized on “60 Minutes” for his actions, Hillary Rodham Clinton sat beside him. Silda Wall Spitzer stood behind her husband as he announced his involvement in a New York prostitution ring, her disdain clearly visible on her face.

Whether the spotlight comes from a campaign or a calamity, it is clear spouses, and particularly wives, are considered a newsworthy part of a politician’s public profile.

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 5/20/11 – South

Joy BaconLeave a comment
*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: The Miami Herald

On the Miami Herald, one of the lead articles featured on the home page as of 10 p.m. (EST) on Friday, May 20 was titled “Judge: No Early Voting Sunday in Miami-Dade Election.” Its subject was a ruling in support of a local election board’s decision around a special election’s timeline.

Here is its gender breakdown:

–Author: Female

–Human sources (listed in order mentioned):

1. Female – judge

2. Male – attorney

3. Male – elections supervisor

4. Male – candidate

Website: Patch (Seminole Heights)

On Patch of Seminole Heights, one of the lead articles featured on the home page as of 10 p.m. (EST) on Friday, May 20 was titled “5 Things to Know About Saturday’s ‘Judgment Day‘.” Its subject was the upcoming prediction of Judgment Day in the Christian faith..

Here is its gender breakdown:

–Author: Male

–Human sources (listed in order mentioned):

1. Male – evangelist (as quoted by another media outlet)