Studies undertaken by The Gender Report.
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
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.
Editor’s note: In January 2011, we set out to examine the ways in which women are represented in online news both as sources and as authors. To mark our first year here at The Gender Report, we’re revealing our findings from our year-long studies as well as other statistics and commentaries in a series of posts. View other coverage of our one-year anniversary here.
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During our first year of operation, we spent time looking at representations of sex and gender in Internet news through our own studies and as well as those by others. To review what we’ve accomplished and what it says about the state of women in online journalism, we’ve updated our effort at the six-month mark to pull together our stats through a roundup list as well as some graphs (Scroll below the slideshow for the full list of stats plus links). Here’s our recap as well as a good way to check out our work if you are new to The Gender Report.
Through our weekly Gender Checks, which started the week of Jan. 18 and were our cornerstone study, we looked at a total of eight U.S. news websites (one associated with a traditional newspaper and another that is online-only), two from each of the four geographic regions. In that study, we’ve found the following:
–Month 1: Women as 27.6 percent of sources and with 32.3 percent of bylines (of articles by a person or several of one gender or the other, not including shared bylines between a woman and a man)
–Month 2: Women as 20.8 percent of sources and with 33.3 percent of bylines
–Month 3: Women as 23.5 percent of sources and with 26.9 percent of bylines
–Three month totals: Women as 24.6 percent of sources and with 31 percent of bylines
–Month 4: Women as 30.4 percent of sources and with 57.1 percent of bylines
–Month 5: Women as 19.5 percent of sources and with 33.3 percent of bylines
–Month 6: Women as 27 percent of sources and with 43.3 percent of bylines
–Six month totals: Women as 25.3 percent of sources and with 37.7 percent of bylines (34.7% overall)
–Month 7: Women as 24.6 percent of sources and with 35 percent of bylines
–Month 8: Women as 24.3 percent of sources and with 44.8 percent of bylines
–Month 9: Women as 27 percent of sources and with 25 percent of bylines
–Nine month totals: Women as 25.3 percent of sources and with 41.9 percent of bylines
–Month 10: Women as 25.5 percent of sources and with 29 percent of bylines
–Month 11: Women as 34.4 percent of sources and with 31.8 percent of bylines
–Month 12: Women as 24.4 percent of sources and with 27.3 percent of bylines
–One year totals: Women as 26 percent of sources and with 35.3 percent of bylines (32.2 percent overall)
In addition to the basic findings related female sources and authors from this study’s monitoring, we also have explored the role of the articles’ subject and of source order as it relates to gender representation. See the links provided below:
Article subject:
-Six months: Gender Check breakdown: A look at female authors, sources by article subject
-Nine months: Science and health articles showing high female sources, low female bylines
-One year: One year: A look at female authors, sources by article subject in Gender Check study
Source order:
-Six months: Gender Check breakdown: A look at source order and gender
-One year: One year: Examining the prominence of female sources in Gender Check study
In addition, we’ve also been examining the sourcing and authorship from the most linked to and talked about articles on the web, via the Project for Excellence in Journalism’s New Media Index:
–January 2011: Women as 21.3 percent of sources and with 33.3 percent of bylines (of articles by a person or several of one gender or the other, not including shared bylines between a woman and a man)
–February 2011: Women as 28 percent of sources and with 41.7 percent of bylines
–March 2011: Women as 15.2 percent of sources and with 28.6 percent of bylines
–April 2011: Women as 25 percent of sources and with 28.6 percent of bylines
–May 2011: Women as 13.3 percent of sources and with 11.1 percent of bylines
–June 2011: Women as 20.2 percent of sources and with 36 percent of bylines
–Six months: Women as 20.2 percent of sources and with 31.3 percent of bylines (26.3 percent overall)
–July 2011: Women as 15 percent of sources and with 50 percent of bylines
–August 2011: Women as 14.1 percent of sources and with 10 percent of bylines
–September 2011: Women as 17.6 percent of sources and with 9.5 percent of bylines
–October 2011: Women as 25 percent of sources and with 15 percent of bylines
–November 2011: Women as 27.2 percent of sources and with 10.5 percent of bylines
–December 2011: Women as 15 percent of sources and with 10 percent of bylines
–One year: Women as 19.1 percent of sources and with 23 percent of bylines (19.6 percent overall)
We’ve also spent some time looking at the information that can be gleaned through or as an off-shoot of the Columbia Journalism Review’s News Frontier Database.
The Gender Report got a shout-out for these studies from Michael Meyer who is in charge of the database during an interview he did with the media blog 10,000 Words in July.
To look at gender representations in news creation in a different way aside from a byline count, we’ve been taking stock of the breakdown in each newsroom of the news sites included in our Gender Check monitoring via their online staff lists:
West: (As of May 25, 2011)
Midwest: (As of June 22, 2011)
*Data from the Northeast and the South still to come.
We’ve also looked at whether the author’s gender affected the use of female sources in our different studies. Here’s what each of these studies showed:
–News Frontier Database “national site study: Women were 38 percent of sources in articles by females and 10 percent of sources in articles by males. Women were 37 percent of sources in those articles with a shared byline by a male and a female.
–New Media Index study: Women were 25.1 percent of sources in articles by females and 18.1 percent of sources in articles by males. Women were only 16.7 percent of sources in articles with a shared byline by a male (or several) and a female.
–Gender Check study: Women were 28.3 percent of sources in articles by females and 24 percent of sources in articles by males. Women were 28.7 percent of sources in articles with a shared byline by a male (or several) and a female.
This issue is one that we’ll continue to look at in the future, particularly because of the differences we are seeing in the shared bylines.
For a comparison, here’s what some other studies on the subject of women and journalism (some specifically related to newspapers and some to online outlets) have uncovered:
–American Society of News Editors: 2011 Newsroom Census: Women made up 36.9 percent of those working full time at daily U.S. newspapers.
-International Women’s Media Foundation’s “The Global Report on the Status of Women in the News Media” (Released March 2011): Women currently hold 27 percent of top management jobs and 26 percent of governing jobs in the news media globally. Women hold 36 percent of reporter jobs, or positions at the “junior professional level” and 41 percent of positions at the senior professional level, which includes anchors, senior writers and producers.
–Global Media Monitoring Project (2010): Overall, 37 percent of stories were reported by women, and 36 percent of stories in the online samples were bylined by women. Women were 24 percent of news subjects – people heard or read on traditional platforms like newspapers, television and radio in the sample. They were 23 percent of news subjects in the websites monitored.
Check back on The Gender Report for our take on what we’ve learned during our first year and what we hope to accomplish in the second.
The Gender Report 