Seventh Month: July 26 – August 18, 2011

During our seventh month of Gender Checks, we reviewed 22 articles, two in each Gender Check with some regions not reporting out each week. For each Gender Check, we looked at two websites from that region — one associated with a newspaper and one that was online-only. For our monitoring, we pulled the top or lead articles on their websites at the time of the check and gathered information on the gender of the author, the breakdown of the genders of the human sources referenced in the articles and other details. (For more on what Gender Checks are, read our introductory post here.)

Sourcing

Overall, the articles contained 52 male sources and 17 female sources, which meant women were 24.6 percent of the human sources referenced.

Here’s how it broke down by geographic region:

• West: 25 males, 2 female (Women at 7.4 percent)
• Northeast: 8 males, 3 females (Women at 27.3 percent)
• Midwest: 19 males, 12  females (Women at 38.7 percent)
• South: Not included in this report

Here’s the breakdown by news sites associated with a traditional newspaper and those that are not.

• Newspaper website: 27 males, 9 females (Women at  25 percent)
• Online-only: 25 males, 8 females (Women at 24.2 percent)

Authorship

This month 7 articles were written by an individual woman and 13 by one or more man, which meant women were 35 percent of authors of one gender or the other this month, which is a drop from 43.3 percent the previous month. The highest came in the fourth month with women as 57.1 percent of bylines, the only month that women were in the majority. There were two shared bylines between a man and a woman each for a print and online site.

Here’s how bylines broke down by geographic region:

• West: 1 story by an individual woman, 7 by an individual man
• Northeast: 3 by a woman, 1 by a man and 2 with a shared byline between a man and a woman
• Midwest: 3 by a woman, 5 by a man
• South: Not included in this report.

Here’s how women did in bylines between newspaper sites and online-only sites this month:

• Newspaper website: 3 by a woman, 7 by a man and 1 with a shared byline between a man and woman
• Online-only: 4 by a woman, 6 by a man, 1 with a shared byline

As always, we remind our readers that these findings reflect a limited amount of data (a month’s worth) from our simple Gender Checks. We hope you recognize the limitations of this data, since we’ve only sampled a few articles from eight news sites. Further research and time is needed to verify any validity across the board.

To look at past month breakdowns and other data on gender representations in online news, check out our “Findings and Statistics” category. Read our report from our first six months of Gender Checks here.