Author: Jasmine R. Linabary

Gender check: 10/25/11 – West

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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: Seattle Times

"3 charged with bilking $250,000 in Seattle schools scandal" - Seattle Times, 10/25/2011

On the Seattle Times, one of the lead articles featured on the home page as of 11:10 a.m. (PDT) Tuesday, Oct. 25, was titled “3 charged with bilking $250,000 in Seattle schools scandal.” Its subject was three people (two men and one woman) charged in a scheme to bilk funds from the school district.

Here is its gender breakdown:

–Author: Male

–Human sources (listed in order mentioned):

  1. Male, defendant
  2. Male, defendant

Notes/analysis: The article includes much detail on the two male defendants but very little on the female defendant. Also, the story had heavy reliance on archives and included one photo of the main male defendant.


Website: Seattle P-I

On the Seattle P-I, one of the lead articles featured on the home page as of 11:10 a.m. (PDT) Tuesday, Oct. 25, was titled “Criminal charges filed in Seattle schools financial scandal.” Its subject was the same as above.

Here is its gender breakdown:

–Author: Male

–Human sources  (listed in order mentioned):

  1. Male, county prosecutor

Notes/analysis: Much shorter in length than the Seattle Times’ story.

Gender check: 10/20/11 – 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)

Stltoday.com, 10/20/2011

On Stltoday.com, one of the lead articles featured on the home page as of 10:10 a.m. (PDT) Thursday, Oct. 20, was titled “Prep work at Busch Stadium begins before dawn.” Its subject was a day in the life of the stadium.

Here is its gender breakdown:

–Author: Male and female shared byline

–Human sources  (listed in order mentioned):

  1. Male, stadium worker
  2. Male, regional executive chef
  3. Female, executive chef
  4. Male, chef
  5. Male, stadium worker
  6. Male, Rangers fan
  7. Male, Rangers fan
  8. Male, camera operator
  9. Male, ballpark cam tech
  10. Male, stadium worker, deliverer
  11. Male, district sales manager
  12. Male, senior VP for standards and on-field operations
  13. Male, one-man ticket brokerage
  14. Male, autograph hunter
  15. Male, baseball writer
  16. Male, camped out
  17. Male, broadcaster
  18. Male, special instructor coach

Notes/analysis: This article goes to show what a man’s world baseball must be. However, two of three photos with people who can be identified feature females.


Website: St. Louis Beacon

On the St. Louis Beacon, one of the lead articles featured on the home page as of 10:10 a.m. (PDT) Thursday, Oct. 20, was titled “McCaskill presses Pentagon to make changes to curb wasteful contracting.” Its subject was pressure put on to put into place recommendations regarding fraud and waste in wartime contracting.

Here is its gender breakdown:

–Author: Male

–Human sources  (listed in order mentioned):

  1. Female, U.S. senator (D)
  2. Male, Pentagon undersecretary in charge of acquisition
  3. Male, joint staffs logistics director
  4. Male and female (joint statement), contracting commission members

Notes/analysis: The article includes one mug shot, of the main female source.

‘Miss Representation’ tackles media representations of women, girls

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A documentary film aimed at challenging media representations of women and girls is now screening at a variety of locations and airs at 9 p.m. ET Thursday, Oct. 20, on the Oprah Winfrey Network.

“Miss Representation,” which first premiered at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, is written, directed and produced by Jennifer Siebel Newsom. According to the film’s description, it draws attention to the ways the media’s “limited and often disparaging” representations of women and girls make it difficult for women to feel powerful or to move up into leadership positions. It includes interviews with a number of powerful and well-known women like Katie Couric, Gloria Steinem, Rosario Dawson and Condoleezza Rice, but also asks teenage girls about their experiences.

We’ll let the trailer speak for itself:

You can join the movement inspired by the film by visiting missrepresentation.org to take a pledge to help spread the film’s messages and to help challenge these portrayals. You can also follow @RepresentPledge on Twitter and “like” Miss Representation on Facebook.

Update: Here are additional links to coverage of the film:

Gender check: 10/18/11 – 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 1 p.m. (PDT) Tuesday, Oct. 18, was titled “Sources: Charges to be filed in Seattle schools scandal.” Its subject was news that a felony theft charge will be filed against a (male) former school district employee.

Here is its gender breakdown:

–Author: Male

–Human sources  (listed in order mentioned):

  1. Unknown (unnamed source)
  2. Unknown (unnamed source)
  3. Male, prosecuting attorney
  4. Male, accused
  5. Unknown, auditor

Notes/analysis: This story is mostly based on unnamed sources and information from the news source’s archives.


Website: Seattle P-I

Seattle P-I, 10/18/2011

On the Seattle P-I, one of the lead articles featured on the home page as of 1 p.m. (PDT) Tuesday, Oct. 18, was titled “Police: Seattle public masturbator arrested.” Its subject was the arrest of a man who had exposed himself to several young girls in North Seattle.

Here is its gender breakdown:

–Author: Male

–Human sources  (listed in order mentioned):

  1. Female, detective

Second month in a row with dismal female byline count in New Media Index stories

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Following a methodology change for the New Media Index reports, The Gender Report has for the second month in a row found the lowest count of female bylines yet, this month coming in at a dismal 9.5 percent.

Here at The Gender Report, we’ve been monitoring the web’s top articles based on links provided in the Project for Excellence in Journalism‘s weekly New Media Index roundups since January. PEJ’s reports the top five news stories and opinion pieces around the web in a Monday to Friday week based on commentary on blogs and social media sites. For the purposes of our study, we’ve chosen to focus on the top five in the blogosphere. When more than one link was provided on the topic, we’ve tried to monitor the first mentioned or the one that appears based on the writing to be more dominant, unless it is mentioned that articles shared the attention for that particular subject.

As we mentioned last month, August marked some changes to the New Media Index’s methodology, including the use of more sites to track the top stories as well as using a larger sample size and range of sources. (Read more about those change and the process here.) As a result, we’ve continued to notice changes in link diversity (particularly from blogs) and in topics, with more technology topics making it into the top five. As we’ve seen so far, this has meant a decrease in the number of sources and the percentage of female bylines. We’ll be continuing to monitor the differences in our results for the months following this methodology change.

Here’s what we found in the past month:

September 2011

PEJ New Media Index: September 26-30, 2011
Between Sept. 5 and Sept. 30, the New Media Index included 24 articles that could be checked. News regarding the new iPhone, usually from tech blogs, appeared every week in the top five. An apology message from Netflix CEO Reed Hastings regarding recent changes to the company’s services appeared in the top five two weeks in a row but is only counted once here. For three top stories during this time, no specific link was provided. Those topics were Facebook (No. 3, Sept 26-30), Google News (No. 3, Sept. 5-9), and Carol Bartz ousted from Yahoo (No. 4, Sept. 5-9).

In the stories we were able to monitor, here’s what we found:

  • Women were 17.6 percent of sources in this month’s articles. The articles contained 28 male sources and 6 female sources.
  • Half of the articles contained no human sources. Nearly all of those links were to blog posts with two coming from opinion columns. In addition, four articles featured only male sources.
  • Only two articles or posts were written or produced by a woman while 19 articles were by one or more man. That means women wrote only 9.5 percent of articles or posts by authors of one gender or the other. One article was by a male and female. Two were by staff. This tops last month’s eight-month low of female bylines, which was at 10 percent.

We’ll be keeping an eye on these findings in the coming months to see if we deduce other trends emerging now that the methodology for the top five articles has changed. 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.