Year: 2011

Gender check: 1/19/11 – 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 3:45 p.m. eastern time on January 19 was titled “Obama Pushes Hu on Rights but Stresses Ties to China.” Its subject was the president of China’s current visit to the White House to discuss trade and other diplomatic topics.

Here is its gender breakdown:

–Authors: both female and male (dual byline)

–Human sources  (listed in order mentioned):

1. Male – president Obama from a press conference

2. Male – president Hu from a press conference

3. Female – secretary of state Hillary Clinton, quoted from her appearance on a morning talk show

Notes/analysis:

Article is a basis news story covering a political presentation from the White House. Outside sources are not directly quoted, so gender breakdown depends entirely on the gender representation in leadership political positions.

Website: ProPublica

On ProPublica, one of the lead articles featured on the home page as of 4 p.m. eastern on Jan. 19, was titled “Life Tenure for Federal Judges Raises Issues of Senility, Dementia.”  Its subject was the possible dangers of aging judges being allowed to continue in their positions. It was co-published with Slate.

Here is its gender breakdown:

–Author: Male (freelance). A male intern also is credited with contributing to the report.

–Human sources  (listed in order mentioned):

1. Male – federal judge

2. unknown- unnamed lawyer who works for the above mentioned judge

3. Male – defense attorney

4. Male – Alexander Hamilton’s comments during the creation of the Constitution

5. Male – scholar at Cambridge University

6. Male –  judge on 6th circuit Court of Appeals

7. Male – U.S. district judge

8. Male – U.S. district judge

9. Male – chief of 7th circuit Court of Appeals

10. Male – assistant federal defender

11. Male – judge on 10th circuit

12. Male – federal judge

13. Male – lawyer

14. Male – federal judge

15. Female – woman’s comment taken from jury selection comments in previous source’s courtroom.

16. Male – consultant for a hot line set up for court system

17. Female – retired federal judge on 4th Circuit

Notes/analysis:

The number of sources used in the story are impressive, but the balance of male vs. female judges interviewed is more than lopsided. According to the Alliance for Justice, as of June 2010, women hold about 30 percent of federal judicial seats. However, only one female judge contributed to this story, and her position in the story is worth noting. In a fairly lengthy piece about several judges’ experiences as they got older, the female source is the only judge who openly discusses her diagnosis of Alzheimer’s and her decision to retire because of the illness. While other male sources discuss routine medical check-ups and mental evaluations, she is the only judge mentioned who leaves the bench. In fact, the author ends the story by saying this judge “may be more the exception than the rule.”

Gender check: 01/18/11 – 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 noon (MST) Tuesday, Jan. 18, was titled “Picasso leaves his mark on SAM.” Its subject was fine arts.

Here is its gender breakdown:

–Author: Female

–Human sources (listed in order mentioned):

1. Male, museum frequenter, manager of cafe across the street
2. Male, museum director
3. Female, spokeswoman for hotel/restaurant (not named)
4. Female, clothing store employee four blocks away from museum

Notes/analysis: Article includes photo of a mixed-gender crowd at the museum exhibit of a well-known male artist.

Website: Seattle P-I

On the Seattle P-I, one of the lead articles featured on the home page as of noon (MST) Tuesday, Jan. 18, was titled “Trial to begin after man critically injured by sheriff’s deputies.” Its subject was crime and courts.

Here is its gender breakdown:

–Author: Male

–Human sources (listed in order mentioned):

1. Male, attorney
2. Female, wife of victim
3. Male, senior deputy prosecutor

Notes/analysis: Alleged victim featured in the article is male, as are alleged deputies involved. Judge referenced at the end is female.

What are ‘Gender Checks’?

Jasmine R. LinabaryLeave a comment

Starting today, the monitors here at The Gender Report will be conducting and sharing weekly Gender Checks for selected news websites across the United States.

So, what exactly is a “Gender Check”? It’s our version of a “check up” to quickly examine the gender representation in a lead article on a news website at a given time. These checks aren’t meant to be considered on their own, but we hope that overtime as we collect them we’ll be able to deduce some trends. Because of this, we urge our readers not to jump to conclusions based on an individual Gender Check.

In a Gender Check, we visit a website and select one of the current lead articles, based on prominence and position on the site’s home page. The information we gather includes the subject of the article, the gender of its author, and the gender, positions and order of its sources. We may also include notes or additional analysis as applicable.

We’ve picked two news websites with generally the same coverage area — one tied to an existing newspaper and another that’s online only* — from each of the four U.S. Census regions. We arrived at this number because eight sites to check regularly felt manageable to the two of us on top of our full-times jobs.

There are hundreds of other online news sites, so we hope our readers review any findings with the understanding that they are only snapshots of a few sites and further research would be needed to verify their validity across the board.

To get started, we’ve dedicated a day each week to one of the different geographic regions  — West, Midwest, South and Northeast — and the Gender Checks from its sites.

Stay tuned tonight for our first of many.

Update 1: We completed a full year of this project in January 2012. See the findings from the first year along with findings from our other studies here. Starting in February, we continued this project but began monitoring new sites in each geographic region. Read about this and other changes here.

Update 2: As of June 14, 2012, we opted to conclude the Gender Check study to make way for new projects. Review all past posts and findings from this study here.

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*We realize that the Seattle P-I was once connected with a newspaper. However, now it’s online only and, for our purposes, we are considering it as such in our study. We’re interested to see if its transition has resulted in any differences between it and its peers that are still associated with an ongoing print product.

Gender and media: By the numbers

Jasmine R. LinabaryLeave a comment

To give a starting point for readers of this site to understand what is known about gender representation in online and mainstream or traditional media, here’s snapshot of some of the numbers.

These figures come from the “Who Makes the News? Global Media Monitoring Project 2010.” This was the first time the study, which is released every five years, included Internet news as a pilot. The chosen day for the study was Nov. 10, 2009, and the study as a whole with all media platforms included media from 100 countries. Sixteen countries were included in the pilot study for online news based on their level of Internet access. The United States was not one of them, though some international news sites were.

Here are some of the numbers:

News subjects:
-24 percent of the people heard or read on traditional platforms like newspapers, television and radio were female in the sample.
-23 percent of the news subjects on the 84 websites monitored were women.

Story focus:
-13 percent of the news items in traditional media focus specifically on women.
-11 percent of the online news stories were centered around women.

Authorship:
-41 percent of stories reported on traditional platforms were by female reporters in the same countries as the Internet pilot. Overall, 37 percent of stories in the whole sample were reported by women.
-36 percent of the news stories in the online samples were reported by women.

Stereotypes:
-46 percent of the stories monitored in traditional media reinforced gender stereotypes, while only 6 percent challenged these stereotypes.
-42 percent of the online news stories were found to reinforce gender stereotypes and only 4 percent challenged them.

These statistics, and more detailed ones on each topics area offered in the report, seem to imply that online news sites follow the same vein as traditional news platforms when it comes to gender. However, it’s noted in the study’s executive summary that “the differences, some of which are statistically significant, point to a conclusion that Internet news is a format in which gender biases become not only more visible but even more concentrated than in the traditional news media.”

Those differences and their extent are some of the topics we hope to delve into further here at The Gender Report — specifically how they reveal themselves in U.S. online media in both news sites with roots in traditional media and those that are online only. Through our Gender Checks, we’ll be recording information similar to what was culled for the GMMP’s study on Internet news stories. We’ll see if our findings are similar.

Read the full report from the “Global Media Monitoring Project 2010” at www.whomakesthenews.org.

Welcome to The Gender Report

Joy Bacon6 Comments

In 2006, Jasmine and I attended a national collegiate journalism conference together. Sort of as a joke, the female staff of our college newspaper wandered into a session about women in the newsroom. A married couple presented their thoughts on gender inequality in the workplace, in society and in the newsroom. The session ended with advice to women in the gender minority for asserting their ideas: just stand up, walk over to the door and turn off the lights. People are trained to stop and listen if the lights go off.

Ever since this session, turning off the lights became sort of an inside joke around our college newsroom. But while the experience was humorous, the sentiments that motivated the advice are anything but a laughing matter, which is something we came more and more to realize as we completed our educations and moved out into the work force ourselves. We both came to college with strong passions for women’s issues, including our gender’s representation and participation in the media. Where was the woman’s voice? The woman’s byline? Or for that matter, where were the men in family leave policies, or stories focusing “women’s issues”?

These issues have continued to dwell in our minds and conversations. This blog formed as a way to monitor these matters and look into how they are affected by new media platforms, specifically Internet news.

Starting next week, we’ll be regularly analyzing articles from a variety of news websites across the United States through our weekly “Gender Checks.” On this blog, we’ll also be offering posts on trends uncovered over time, links to related resources and a gender news feed.

We hope this site can serve as a resource in the ongoing dialogue about gender and the news media. Find out more about this site on the “About” page.

Feel free to contact us with questions or ideas by e-mail at genderreport@gmail.com. You can also keep tabs on what we’re up to by signing up for e-mail updates or following us on Twitter.

Let’s get the conversation started, with the lights on.