One year: Project examines gender representations in the New Media Index

Jasmine R. LinabaryLeave a comment

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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A year ago, we asked: What percentage of the most talked about articles on the web feature or are written by women? What we found as we sought to answer this question was not encouraging.

But before we share those results, here’s how we approached answering that question. For a full year, from January through December 2011, we monitored each of the web’s top articles based on the links provided by the Project for Excellence in Journalism‘s weekly New Media Index reports. The New Media Index reports the top five linked to and discussed stories and opinion pieces from the web during a Monday through Friday week based on commentary from blogs and social media sites. For the purposes of our study, we chose to focus in on the main top five in the blogosphere.

During each month of this year span, between 11 and 33 articles could be checked, resulting in a total of 250 articles examined for the completed study.

Though each week generally averaged five subjects, there were occasions when more than one link was offered on the subject. When that was the case, we chose to monitor the first mentioned or that which appeared based on the writing as more dominant, unless it was mentioned or implied that two articles shared the attention, in which case we checked both. For some weeks or subjects, no links were provided, resulting in lower numbers during those months’ totals. For each article, we recorded the subject matter, the gender breakdown of the sources and the gender of the authors or producers, similar to what we’ve done with our weekly “gender checks.”

It is important to note that PEJ made some changes to its methodology for the New Media Index in August, including the use of more sites to track the top stories as well as a larger sample size and range of sources (Read more about those change and the process here.) As a result, we did see some major differences in the sources of the articles and our findings in the months after that change, which is why we’ve provided our results overall as well as broken out for those articles before the August changes and those after. This did skew the overall results, so we caution readers to keep these limitations in mind.

Without further ado, here are our overall findings for this study:

Sourcing

In this study, women were 19.1 percent of sources whose gender could be identified. Approximately 520 sources were male and 123 were female.

Our low and high points for the year for female sources came in the first six months. The low point for female sources came in May, when women were only 13.3 percent of sources. The high was in February with 28 percent.

Somewhat disturbing was the finding that 87 of the 250 articles, or 34.8 percent, had no female sources at all, in other words contained only male sources. However this percentage has dropped from the six-month mark, when 41.5 percent of articles contained no female sources. In contrast, only four articles had no male sources.

What has gone up is the percentage of articles with no sources at all. Only 8.5 percent of articles at the six-month mark had no sources. By 12 months, 30.4 percent, or 76 of 250 articles, had none. This difference was largely a result of the change in the New Media Index’s methodology, which resulted in more blog posts rather than news articles in the top five, many of which did not name human sources.

For articles in the sample written by women, females made up 25.1 percent of sources. In articles written by men, that percentage falls to 18.1. In articles with shared bylines between a man (or men) and a woman, 16.7 percent of sources were women.

Authorship

A woman (or on occasion two) bylined 23 percent of articles by authors of one gender or the other and 19.6 percent of articles overall. Over the course of the year, 164 articles were by one or more man, 49 by one or more woman, 16 with a shared byline between a man (or several) and a woman, and 21 were not bylined or were written by staff.

The year low for female authorship occurred in September, when women made up a dismal 9.5 percent of authors of one gender or the other and 8.3 percent overall. February again had the high with women as 41.7 percent.

Twenty-six articles linked to were op-ed or commentary pieces over the course of the year. Just three of those were by women. One was a staff editorial. In addition, of the blog posts, nearly all showing up after the change in methodology, five of 61 were by women and only one of eight posts by a business was by a woman.

During the year, 13 articles were written by more than one person of the same gender. Three were shared bylines with females and 10 shared bylines among males.

Before changes: January to July 2011

Prior to the change in the methodology for the New Media Index, the majority of links provided were to news articles from major news websites, with the majority of articles from the LA Times, Washington Post and BBC. In these seven months, we reviewed 137 articles, averaging 19.6 articles per month. These were the findings overall from these articles:

  • Women were 19.6 percent of sources during this time. The articles contained 374 male sources and 91 female sources. There were on average 66.4 sources in a given month.
  • During this time 45.3 percent of articles contained only male sources. Only three articles contained only female sources. Eleven articles, or 8 percent, contained no sources at all.
  • Thirty-eight articles were written or produced by women while 75 were written by men. This means women wrote 33.6 percent of articles by a person(s) of one gender or the other. Twelve articles had shared bylines between a man and a woman and 12 were by staff, meaning that women had 27.7 percent of bylines overall.

After changes: August to December 2011

In contrast, following the changes in the New Media Index, no particular website had more than five out of the total 113 articles or posts. Those that had five were three tech sites 9 to 5 Mac, Engadget and Ubergizmo, as well as posts from Google on its official company blog. The majority of the top stories during these five months were not from mainstream news sites, but instead blogs and specialty or alternative sites. During this time, there were an average of 22.6 articles per month. The following are the overall findings from these articles and posts:

  • Women were 18 percent of sources. The articles contained 146 male sources and 32 female sources. There were on average half as many sources in a given month as the earlier period with 35.6 sources per month.
  • In this time frame, 22.1 percent of articles, or 25 out of 113, contained no female sources (only male sources). Only one article was the reverse, containing only female sources. However, 57.5 percent of articles during these months, or 65 articles, contained no sources at all.
  • Just eleven articles were written or produced by women while 89 were written by men. By percentage, this means 11 percent of articles by a person(s) of one gender or the other. Four articles had shared bylines between a man and a woman and nine were by staff, making those articles written by women a mere 9.7 percent of the whole.

A look back

Review our posts from the year on our New Media Index study through the links below:

For other data on gender representations in online news and to compare these findings to others’, check out our “Findings and Statistics” category and our “Useful Resources” page.

Up next: Check back Wednesday for results from our year-long Gender Check study.

We’re interested in what you make of the findings. Share your thoughts in the comment section below or using the #GRdiscuss hashtag on Twitter.

12th month shows dip in female sources and authors

Joy BaconLeave a comment

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 month 12 of our Gender Check monitoring project, women were 24.4 percent of human sources whose gender could be identified.

Here’s our breakdown of this month’s findings:

Month 12: Dec. 26, 2011 – Jan. 19, 2012

During our 12th month, we reviewed 24 articles, two in each Gender Check. That included four Gender Checks from the West and Midwest regions, three from the Northeast and one from the South.The South typically has a higher percentage of female authors and sources, which may be a cause for the lower results this month.

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.)

Sourcing

The articles from this month contained 23 female sources and 71 male sources, making women just under 24.4 percent of human sources whose gender could be identified.

Of the articles we examined this month, nine of the 24 articles had only male sources. Two articles had only female sources and four articles contained no sources.

Here’s how sourcing broke down by geographic region:

  • West:  23 males, 13 females (Women at 36.1 percent)
  • Northeast: 23 males, 3 females (Women at 11.5 percent)
  • Midwest: 23 males, 7 females (Women at  23.3 percent)
  • South: 2 males, no female (Women at 0  percent) – this is just the result of one Gender Check

We’ve also broken down our findings by news sites associated with a traditional newspaper and those that are not. Here are this month’s results:

  • Newspaper website: 45 males, 12 females (Women at 21 percent)
  • Online-only: 26 males, 11 females (Women at 29.7 percent)

Authorship

In the 12th month, six articles were written by a woman and 16 by one or more man. That gave women 27.3 percent of bylines of one gender or another and 25 percent overall. Two articles had a shared byline between a man and a woman.

Here’s the break down of bylines by geographic region:

  • West: 2 by a woman, 6 by men
  • Northeast: 2 by women, 3 by men, 1 by a man and woman
  • Midwest: 2 by a woman, 5 by a man, 1 by a man and woman
  • South: 0 by a woman, 2 by a man

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

  • Newspaper website: 2 by a woman, 8 by men, 2 shared
  • Online-only: 4 by a woman, 8 by a man

As a reminder to our readers, these findings stated above reflect a limited amount of data 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.

Be sure to check back for our analysis and findings from our full year of Gender Checks in this week’s anniversary coverage.

To look at past month breakdowns and other data on gender representations in online news, check out our “Findings and Statistics” category.

*Editor’s note: Some of the numbers in this post have been corrected.

December’s New Media Index count results in low female bylines, sources

Jasmine R. LinabaryLeave a comment

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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A low article count in December’s monitoring of the New Media Index resulted in few female bylines and sources.

December’s monitoring marked a full year of monitoring the top articles of the web based on links provided in the Project for Excellence in Journalism‘s weekly New Media Index roundups. Findings from the year will be released later this week.

For some background, the New Media Index 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 focused 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.

Here’s what we found in the 12th month:

December 2011

PEJ New Media Index: December 26-30, 2011
Between Dec. 5 and Dec. 30, the New Media Index included only 11 articles that could be checked. No report was released for the week of Dec. 12-16. The same review of the Asus Transformer Prime appeared in all three weeks in which there were reports. In the week of Dec. 5-9, no link was provided for the No. 5 topic of the 2012 presidential race. Likewise, no link was offered for the No. 5 story of drunk history humor video in the week of Dec. 19-23.

In the stories we monitored, here’s what we found:

  • Women were 15 percent of sources in December’s articles. The articles contained 17 male sources and 3 female sources.
  • Only 3 of the 11 articles contained human sources. Two of those three had only male sources. The vast majority of the sources came from one article, the only by a female author.
  • One post was written or produced by a woman while nine articles were by a man. One company post did not identify a specific author.

This low number of sources overall and small percentage of female bylines has been a trend since the New Media Index’s methodology underwent changes in August. As we’ve mentioned previously, these changes included the use of more sites to track the top stories as well as a larger sample size and range of sources. (Read more about those change and the process here.) As a result, we’ve also continued to notice changes in link diversity (particularly from blogs) and in topics, with more technology topics making it into the top five.

Up next

Check back later this week for the results of our year-long study of the New Media Index. We’ll be comparing the findings from August forward to those for the earlier part of the year to more clearly see the differences as a result of the change in the New Media Index’s methodology.

To look at past months’ findings as well as other statistics on gender and the online news, visit our findings and statistics page.

One year: Gender Report kicks off week of anniversary coverage

Jasmine R. LinabaryLeave a comment

A year ago this month, we founded The Gender Report as an effort to start a conversation about gender representations in online news. As such, this month also marks the completion of two year-long studies that have attempted to examine the presence of women as sources and authors of Internet news coverage.

We invite you to join us as we commemorate the occasion this week, with coverage stretching from Sunday, Jan. 29 through Sunday, Feb. 5. To start, we’ll have daily posts uncovering what we’ve found in our first year.  These posts will unveil data from our year-long Gender Check monitoring project as well as our 12-month study of the articles in the Project for Excellence in Journalism’s New Media Index. We’ll start the week with posts on the findings from the final month of both studies followed mid-week by the complete results from the full year examined from several different angles.

In addition, we’ll be providing a recap post of all that we’ve accomplished to date in our first year, a review of women in the news over the past year, and commentary on what we’ve learned and what our plans are for the future. Watch for this logo (right) as we start our coverage. In case you miss any of our one-year anniversary posts, you can view it all in one place here.

We’ll be discussing our findings on Twitter this week, so we invite you to join us there as well. In addition to the comment sections on posts, you can share your thoughts and ask us questions about our results and our projects using the #GRdiscuss hashtag. You can help us celebrate our anniversary by following The Gender Report on Twitter and Facebook or by encouraging others to do so.

We’d also like to take this chance to thank you, our readers and followers. We appreciate all of your support and encouragement this first year. It has meant a lot to us. We hope you’ll stick around to continue this dialogue about gender and the news media. We look forward to hearing from you in year two.

Check back for our first post of our year one coverage later today.

Looking back: Top posts of the year

Jasmine R. LinabaryLeave a comment

This month marks a year since we founded The Gender Report. We’re taking a brief pause from our regular content this week while we gear up for our week-long celebration starting Jan. 29, in which we’ll share findings and commentary from our year-long studies and projects. In the meantime, review what we’ve been up to for the past 12 months by checking out the top five most read posts from our first year.

1. Where are the women in the Romenesko discussion?

Our most read post this year came in November 2011, when journalism industry icon Jim Romenesko resigned. We looked at the gender breakdown of those commenting on, discussing or writing about this announcement and the preceding allegations by the Poynter Institute.

2. Women breaking journalism’s glass ceiling: The ascent of Jill Abramson and others

This Week in Review from June 2011 highlighted women who were moving up the ranks in journalism. This included the announcement that Jill Abramson would be the new executive editor of The New York Times, the first woman to fill that spot in the paper’s 160-year history.

3. Week in Review: Women journalists in the news

The No. 3 post was a Week in Review from December 2011 in which we provided a round-up of stories about women in journalism ranging from the treatment of female journalists abroad to recent studies and discussions about women in newsroom leadership.

4. New study: Women hold less than one-third of top news media jobs

Our write-up on the International Women’s Media Foundation’s “The Global Report on the Status of Women in the News Media” was our fourth most popular post. The study, which looked at more than 500 companies in nearly 60 countries, was released in March 2011.

5. Examining gender representations in the New Media Index

The introduction of our year-long study monitoring articles in the Project for Excellence in Journalism’s New Media Index was our fifth most read post. This write-up included findings from the first four months of the study. Final results on the full year of this project will be released next week.