The Gender Report

During the 10th month of our Gender Check monitoring project, women made up 25.5 percent of sources and 29 percent of authors of one gender or the other. This marked a higher showing of female authors than the previous month, which resulted in an all-time low in our study thus far at 25 percent.

Here’s the breakdown of our findings:

Tenth Month: Oct. 24 – Nov. 17, 2011

We reviewed 32 articles, two in each Gender Check, during our 10th month. That included four Gender Checks from each of our geographic regions.

For each Gender Check, we looked at two websites from that region — one connected with a newspaper and one that is online-only. We then 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

This month’s articles contained 23 female sources and 67 male sources, making women 25.5 percent of human sources whose gender could be identified. Eight articles this month contained no identified sources. Twelve of 32 articles, or 37.5 percent, contained only male sources. Only two had only female sources.

Here’s how sourcing broke down by geographic region:

• West: 13 males, 6 female (Women at 31.6 percent)
• Northeast: 23 males, 4 females (Women at 14.8 percent)
• Midwest: 13 males, 6 females (Women at 31.6 percent)
• South: 18 male, 7 female (Women at 28 percent)

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: 53 males, 16 females (Women at 23.2 percent)
• Online-only: 14 males, 7 females (Women at 33.3 percent)

Authorship

During this month, nine articles were written by a woman and 22 by one or more man. That gave women 29 percent of bylines of one gender or another. There was also one article written by staff.

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

• West: 2 stories by a woman, 6 by a man
• Northeast: 1 by a woman, 7 by one or more man
• Midwest: 1 by a woman, 6 by a man, 1 by staff
• South: 5 by a woman, 3 by a man

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

• Newspaper website: 4 by a woman, 11 by men and 1 by staff
• Online-only: 5 by a woman, 11 by a man

As a word of reminder to our readers, these findings 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.

Last month, we released our findings to date at the nine-month mark. At that point, women were 25.3 percent of sources and 38.2 percent of authors overall. Read more of the findings here.

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