As we well know, and as the recent Status of Women in the U.S. Media report from the Women’s Media Center illustrates, women have long been underrepresented and misrepresented in traditional media and entertainment.
Yet, little is still known about how that translates digitally. Continue reading
A new report from the Women’s Media Center draws attention to persistent and pervasive gender gaps in U.S. media.
The report, titled The Status of Women in U.S. Media 2013, provides a thorough summary of recent findings and studies pertaining to women’s representation in the media over the past year. It includes findings related to newspapers, television, radio, film, social media, literature, and video games. WMC released a similar report for 2012.
“The report shows that while media is the most powerful economic and cultural force today, it still falls far too short in its representation of women,” said Julie Burton, president of the Women’s Media Center, in a press release. “Who tells the story, what the story is about, and who is quoted in the story are core to the work of The Women’s Media Center, and the numbers demonstrate that the glass ceiling extends across all media platforms. We can do better – we must do better. Women represent 51 percent of the U.S. population yet we’re still not seeing equal participation. That means we are only using half our talent and usually hearing half of the story.”
This years report points to a number of findings we’ve also featured on our site over the past year, including that the percentage of women in U.S. newsrooms has remained unchanged at 36.9 percent since 1999. Our Byline Report study, which looked at the gender breakdowns of bylines at six online-only news sites, is featured in the report. The study found that male bylines outnumbered female bylines four out of the six websites we examined during our six-month study. As the WMC report notes, “Newer, online-only news sites have fallen into the same rut as legacy media.” You can read about our findings on pages 20-21.
Here are some of the other highlights related to news media from the WMC report:
A few media outlets have picked up on the report since its release last Friday. Here’s a round-up of coverage of the report thus far:
–Women’s Media Center: Gender Gap In Media Is A ‘Crisis’ (Huffington Post Media)
–No news is bad news for women in media (by Erik Wemple at the Washington Post)
–Report: New media no better than old media when it comes to women’s bylines (Poynter)
–What Impact Do Women Have On The Pop Culture They Create? (Think Progress)
–Muting Women: Women Are Shut Out in the Media (by Jamie Stiehm at the U.S. News & World Report)
–Seth MacFarlane’s Oscar jokes were bad, but they’re just part of a bigger problem (Christian Science Monitor)
Download and read the full report from the Women’s Media Center here.
Research has long demonstrated a gender gap in who writes and produces the news, but less is known about how and if that gap has materialized online. The goal of our Byline Report project has been to take a look at how this plays out at online-only news websites. This six-month project examined the gender breakdown of bylines at six online news websites weekly based on the sites’ RSS feeds.
The 26-week byline count took place between July 1, 2012, and Dec. 29, 2012. Weekly reports were made throughout the study’s duration and can be accessed on our “Byline Report” page.
The study’s six websites were selected from the Columbia Journalism Review’s Guide to Online News Startups. Two websites were randomly selected from the three top editorial staff size filters used in the database (More than 40, 21 to 40, and 11 to 20). The six sites selected were the Center for Public Integrity, Politico, Slate, ProPublica, California Watch and the Texas Tribune. (You can read more about the study’s background in our introductory post here.)
Over the course of this study, a total of 14,048 articles were monitored. The percentage of bylines for males exceeded that of females at four out of the six sites. At both ProPublica and California Watch, there were more female bylines than male bylines, though by narrower margins than those of the sites were males outnumbered females. At ProPublica, the difference was only 1.1 percent.
The three websites with the highest numbers of articles published also had the smallest percentages of female bylines. At all three — Slate, Politico and the Texas Tribune — women were less than 30 percent of authors.
Here are the breakdowns by website:
A total of 369 articles were published in the California Watch RSS feed during this time period, an average of roughly 14 articles per week.
The Center for Public Integrity
The Center for Public Integrity, or iWatch, published 522 articles in its RSS feed, an average of 20 articles per week. iWatch changed its name back to The Center for Public Integrity as of Aug. 19, 2012. Read about the change here. The relatively high percentage of “other” articles can be attributed to the second week in the study, when iWatch used a larger number of articles from wire services.
Politico does not offer a general RSS feed so the “2012” RSS feed was selected for monitoring. During the 26 weeks of the study, Politico published an impressive 9,037 articles in this feed, averaging roughly 348 articles a week. This total does not include any dead links.
ProPublica published the fewest articles of the set with 274, or 11 articles per week. ProPublica showed the biggest change from when we reported our findings from the first three months of this byline count. At that time, women wrote 50.4 percent of the articles and men wrote 37.6 percent. That gap has since narrowed.
The percentage of articles by women at ProPublica is higher than we found in our 2011 Gender Check study. That study looked at lead articles on news websites and found that women wrote only 30.8 percent of those articles monitored at ProPublica during the study’s time frame.
Slate published 2,411 articles during the time frame, or approximately 93 articles per week.
The Texas Tribune published 1,435 articles, or roughly 55 per week. Duplicate articles in the RSS feed were removed and not counted in the total so each article was only counted once.
*The other category includes articles that have no byline as well as those by staff and wire services.
Women wrote less than one-third of articles at online-only news sites during the first three months of our Byline Report project.
The six-month project, which began July 1, examines the gender breakdown of bylines at six online news websites weekly based on the sites’ RSS feeds. Research has long demonstrated a gender gap in who writes and produces the news, but less is still known about how it has materialized online. The goal of this project is to contribute to our knowledge of how this plays out at online-only news websites.
The project is still ongoing, but here’s what we’ve found 13 weeks in:
During the first three months of this study, 7,145 articles were monitored in total. Men wrote 60.6 percent of these articles, while women wrote 29.3 percent. Additionally, 4.3 percent of articles had a shared byline between men and women and 5.9 percent of articles were by staff or wire services.
The percentage of bylines for males exceeded that of females at four out of the six sites. At both ProPublica and California Watch, female reporters bylined more articles than their male counterparts.
Here are the breakdowns by website:
A total of 237 articles were published in the California Watch RSS feed during this time period, an average of roughly 18 articles per week.
The Center for Public Integrity
The Center for Public Integrity, or iWatch, published 348 articles in its RSS feed, an average of 27 articles per week. iWatch changed its name back to The Center for Public Integrity as of Aug. 19, 2012. Read about the change here. The relatively high percentage of “other” articles can be attributed to the second week in the study, when iWatch used a larger number of articles from wire services.
Politico does not offer a general RSS feed so the “2012” RSS feed was selected for monitoring. During the first 13 weeks of the study, Politico published an impressive 4,606 articles in this feed, averaging roughly 354 articles a week. This total does not include any dead links.
ProPublica published the fewest articles of the set with 117, or nine articles per week.
Slate published 1,083 articles during the time frame, or approximately 83 articles per week.
The Texas Tribune published 754 articles, or roughly 58 per week. Duplicate articles in the RSS feed were removed and not counted in the total so each article was only counted once.
Monitoring for these sites will continue for another three months to see if these numbers hold over time. Weekly reports can be accessed on our “Byline Report” page. The study’s six websites were selected from the Columbia Journalism Review’s Guide to Online News Startups. Two websites were randomly selected from the three top editorial staff size filters used in the database (More than 40, 21 to 40, and 11 to 20). Read more about the study’s background in our introductory post here.
*The other category includes articles that have no byline as well as those by staff and wire services.
We began our Gender Check monitoring project in January 2011, aiming to monitor eight U.S. news websites weekly, two from each geographic region.
After the first year of our Gender Check project, women were 26 percent of sources in our sample of 354 articles. Additionally, women had 32.2 percent of bylines overall.
Starting in February 2012, we switched the websites we were monitoring with the intent to complete a second round of the project. Due to some changes in store for the Gender Report as well as some monitoring challenges, we decided to conclude this leg of the project after roughly four months.
Here’s a breakdown of our findings for that time period:
During these four months, we reviewed 100 articles, two in each Gender Check. After cleaning up the data, results from 95 articles are reported here.
The West (Los Angeles Times and California Watch) and Midwest (Chicago Tribune and Chicagoist) were monitored for the full 18-week period. Two articles from the Midwest were later discarded and one was missed as we reevaluated. That is because we’d originally started the project by monitoring the Chicago News Cooperative, which subsequently halted publication at the end of February. We then started monitoring the Chicagoist in its stead.
In addition, seven weeks of monitoring were completed for the Northeast (Boston.com and Open Media Boston) and South (Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Patch Buckhead). Seven weeks of Gender Checks from the Northeast were completed between Feb. 15 and April 11. For two of those weeks, Open Media Boston could not be monitored because the site had not been updated since the previous week. The South had seven Gender Checks between Feb. 13 and March 26.
While we felt it was important to wrap up our study and share what we found in the few months we’ve done of its second year, we’d like to remind our readers that these are very small sample sizes and therefore the data should be viewed with caution. Further research and time would be needed to verify any validity across the board.
For each Gender Check, we looked at two websites from that region — one connected with a newspaper and one that is online-only. We selected the top or lead articles on their websites at the time of the check and collect information on the author’s (or authors’) gender and the genders of the human sources referenced among other details. (For more on what Gender Checks are, read our introductory post here.)
The articles included in this sample contained 98 female sources and 243 male sources, making women 28.7 percent of human sources whose gender could be identified.
Thirty-nine of the articles we examined, or 41 percent, had only male sources. Seven articles had only female sources and 12 articles contained no sources.
Here’s how sourcing broke down by geographic region:
Additionally, we break down our findings by news sites associated with a traditional newspaper and those that are online only. Here are those results:
In our sample, 23 articles were written by a woman and 62 by one or more man. Four articles had a shared byline between men and women. Six were by staff and/or a wire service. That meant women had 27.1 percent of bylines of one gender or another and 24.2 percent overall.
Here’s the break down of bylines by geographic region:
Here’s how women compared in bylines between newspaper sites and online-only sites this month:
Review findings from the first year of the Gender Check project here. To look at other data on gender representations in online news, check out our “Findings and Statistics” category.
The Gender Report 