authorship

Despite reduced sample, women lose ground in authorship in seventh month

Joy BaconLeave a comment

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.

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Gender Check breakdown: A look at female authors, sources by article subject

Jasmine R. LinabaryLeave a comment

Is there a difference in the representation of women as sources and authors based on the subject of the article?

This is a question we’d been asking ourselves. We did look at the issue of coverage type when we examined the number of female principal staff members for online news sites through the Columbia Journalism Review’s News Frontier Database and found differences, but we’d yet to address it through our article monitoring.

Since marking six months of our Gender Check monitoring project and releasing our initial findings at the end of July, we’ve had a chance to spend some more time with our data and look at it from different angles, including this one.

We went back through our findings and looked at each of the 190 article we gender checked by topic. To have a basis of comparison as well as a some-what standardized approach, we opted to use (to the best of our ability) the Global Media Monitoring Project‘s news stories classification system (Click for a PDF of the system). This system divides articles into eight categories with a numbering system for further breakdowns within each category. Due to the number of articles in our sample at this time, we’ve opted just to look at the representation of women in each of the main categories, though we hope to look at further divisions in the future. None of our articles fell under the categories of “Other” and ‘The Girl-Child,” so we’ll just be sticking to the six remaining categories.

In terms of the subject classification of the articles we monitored in the first six months of our Gender Check project, the largest number fell under “Crime and Violence” (62 out of 190). That was followed by “Politics and Government” (41), “Economy” (38), “Social and Legal” (24), “Science and Health” (16) and “Celebrity, Arts, Media and Sports” (9).

Within those categories, here’s what we found:

Sourcing

The classification with the lowest percentage of female sources was “Social and Legal” at 19.8 percent followed closely by “Politics and Government” at 20.2 percent. The highest percentage of female sources went to “Science and Health” at 30.4 percent.

Here’s the breakdown by classification:

  • Politics and Government: 142 males, 36 females (Women as 20.2 percent)
  • Economy: 100 males, 34 females (Women as 25.4 percent)
  • Science and Health: 55 males, 24 females (Women as 30.4 percent)
  • Social and Legal: 73 males, 18 females (Women as 19.8 percent)
  • Crime and Violence: 180 males, 73 females (Women as 28.9 percent)
  • Celebrity, Arts, Media and Sports: 22 males, 9 females (Women as 29 percent)

Authorship

Even though they had the highest percentage of female sources, “Science and Health” articles did not fair well when it came to female bylines. Articles in this classification had the lowest percentage of female authors at 25 percent. The closest to byline parity was in “Economy” where females made up 44.7 percent of authors.

Here’s how it separated out by classification:

  • Politics and Government: 15 stories by women, 23 by men, 3 shared bylines between a man and a woman (Women as 36.6 percent)
  • Economy: 17 by women, 21 by men (Women as 44.7 percent)
  • Science and Health: 4 by women, 11 by men, 1 shared (Women as 25 percent)
  • Social and Legal: 9 by women, 13 by men, 2 shared (Women as 37.5 percent)
  • Crime and Violence: 18 by women, 35 by men, 8 shared, 1 by contributors (Women as 29 percent)
  • Celebrity, Arts, Media and Sports: 3 by women, 6 by men (Women as 33.3 percent)

We’ll be continuing to watch for trends that emerge in subject areas over time as our study progresses. We’d like to hear from you. What did you find most interesting or surprising about these results? What are you curious to know?

For more information on gender representations in online news, check out our “Findings and Statistics” and “Useful Resources” pages.

Getting the discussion started: Gender representations in online news

Jasmine R. LinabaryLeave a comment

Is your voice being represented in the news? Odds are, if you’re a woman, probably not. Women make up 50.7 percent of the U.S. population, according to the most recent census, but when it comes to representation in the news they are present in much lower numbers.

The presence of women is what we’ve been attempting to calculate here at The Gender Report, particularly when it comes to the emergent platform of online news. Thus far, we’ve found that among lead articles on online news sites, both those associated with a newspaper and those that are online-only, women make up only 25.3 percent of sources. That percentage drops lower when we look at the most linked to and discussed articles of the web in the New Media Index in which women are only 20.2 percent of sources.

And, when it comes to producing online news, women haven’t reached parity there either. Our counts have found that once articles with no bylines and those with shared bylines between a man and a woman are taken out of the equation, women wrote 37.7 percent of the lead articles on the online news sites in our study. Of the top articles around the web, they bylined 31.3 percent. They are also absent among the principal staff members of online-only news sites, filling 28 percent of these positions, based on our look at the News Frontier Database.

These numbers, while serving to identify and bring attention to the fact that women’s voices are missing, present us with more questions than answers. That’s why we’d like to take our project a step further by starting a discussion on why this is the case and what can be done about it.

For the next several weeks, we’ll be posting discussion questions here on our website with the tag “Report Your Thoughts” as well as through Facebook and Twitter (using the hashtag #GRdiscuss). We hope you’ll get involved by sharing your thoughts and comments on questions like: Where are the women? Why does it matter? What’s the solution? And who’s working toward change?

Join us in this conversation. Let’s get the discussion started.

Six months: Findings on women as sources, authors in Gender Check monitoring project

Jasmine R. LinabaryLeave a comment

Editor’s note: Six months ago, we set out to look at how women are represented in online news both as sources and as authors. To mark our progress, this week we’re reviewing our findings as well as unveiling new statistics based on what we’ve uncovered thus far in a series of posts. View other six-month coverage here.

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On Jan. 18, 2011, we began a project to monitor U.S. news websites as part of an effort to look at gender representations in online news.

In this effort, we monitored two websites — one associated with a newspaper and one that was online-only — in four different geographic regions once a week. These websites included the Seattle Times, Seattle P-I, New York Times, ProPublica, Stltoday.com, St. Louis Beacon, Miami Herald and Patch (Seminole Heights).

We pulled the lead article from each site at the time we visited and performed a “Gender Check” by recording information on the gender of the author and the breakdown of the genders of the human sources referenced in the articles among other details. (For more on what Gender Checks are, read our introductory post here.)

Last week, with our Gender Check from the South, we completed six months’ worth of monitoring. Between Jan. 18 and July 22, we monitored a total of 190 articles, averaging about 32 articles a month. This included 52 articles each from the West and Midwest regions, 46 articles from the Northeast and 40 articles from the South. These lower counts in the Northeast and South may have some slight affect overall, but these regions’ standings among the others have remained fairly consistent over time.

Without further ado, here are our findings:

Sourcing

During our first six months of Gender Checks, women made up 25.3 percent of human sources referenced in the articles we monitored. This broke down to 572 male sources and 194 female sources. This does not include those whose gender could not be identified.

The high came with women as 30.4 percent of sources in the fourth month followed by our low at 19.5 percent in the fifth month.

Seventy-one of the 190 articles monitored contained only male sources (no female sources), or roughly 37.4 percent. This compared to 11 articles with only female sources, or 5.8 percent. Four articles contained no sources at all.

Among geographic regions, the West and the South both had the highest percentage of women as sources at roughly 30 percent. The Northeast was the lowest at 20.7 percent.

Here’s how that broke down geographically:

  • West: 128 males, 55 female (Women at 30 percent)
  • Northeast: 207 males, 54 females (Women at 20.7 percent)
  • Midwest: 158 males, 51 females (Women at 24.4 percent)
  • South: 79 male, 34 female (Women at 30.1 percent)

Online-only outlets have continued a trend of using a slightly higher percentage of female sources than those associated with a newspaper that we first started observing in our first quarter findings. After six months, women were 28.1 percent of sources at online-only sites versus 22.4 percent at newspaper-connected sites. This trend of the online-only sites having the higher percentage of female sources held true in every region. Among the newspaper sites were the two lowest percentages of woman as sources, coming from the New York Times (only 14.2 percent) and Stltoday.com (at 19 percent). We’ll note that when you divide out the numbers by individual news sites, the number of articles in our sample is still low, so that should be kept in mind. We’ll still need to see if those trends for specific news sites hold over time.

Online-only sites also had a few more sources overall, attributable to the fact that the St. Louis Beacon and then ProPublica had the highest number of sources in our study. However, the number was brought down by the Patch site in the category, which had the lowest number of sources in our sample.

  • Newspaper website: 291 males, 84 females (Women at 22.4 percent)
  • Online-only:  281 males, 110 females (Women at 28.1 percent)

Authorship

Overall, women wrote 66 of the articles in our study, while men bylined 109. Fourteen articles had a shared byline between a man (or men) and a woman. One article was by contributors. This meant women bylined 34.7 percent of articles in our study, and 37.7 percent of articles by a person (or persons) of one gender or the other.

Eleven articles were written by more than one man, but no articles in our sample were written by more than one woman.

During one month of our study, the count of women’s bylines exceeded that of men. In the fourth month, women bylined 16 of 32 stories. Men wrote 12 and the remainder were shared bylines between a man and a woman.

When the numbers are looked at by geographic region, the Northeast had the lowest percentage of female bylines with 23.9 percent of the articles. In our sites from the South, women were near parity with 45 percent.

  • West: 17 stories by an individual woman, 32 by one or more man, two with a shared byline between a man and a woman, one by contributors (Women at 32.7 percent overall)
  • Northeast: 11 by an individual woman, 28 by one or more man, seven with a shared byline (Women at 23.9 percent overall)
  • Midwest: 20 by a woman, 28 by one or more man, four with a shared byline (Women at 38.5 percent overall)
  • South: 18 by a woman, 21 by one or more man, one with a shared byline (Women at 45 percent overall)

In bylines we again observed another trend we began seeing during our first quarter findings. Though newspaper-related sites may have fewer female sources than their online-only counterparts, they do fair better than them when it comes to bylines. Of the articles from newspaper sites in our study, 38.9 percent were bylined by women. This compared to 30.5 percent at online-only outlets. The same trend held true in all geographic regions, except the Northeast, where ProPublica had a very slightly higher percentage of female bylines than the New York Times — a difference at this point of less than a percent.

  • Newspaper website: 37 by a woman, 47 by one or more man, 10 with shared bylines between a man and woman, one by contributors (Women at 38.9 percent overall)
  • Online-only: 29 by a woman, 62 by one or more man, four with shared bylines (Women at 30.5 percent overall)

Author gender and source selection

Like we have with our other recent monitoring studies, we also looked at how the author’s gender affected the use of female sources. Again, we saw a difference, with women having a higher percentage of female sources than men, though the difference was not as large quite as large as in the other studies.

In this case in our first six months, females were 28.1 percent of sources in articles written by women and 21.8 percent in those written by men. Articles with a shared byline between a man and women had women as 33 percent of sources. Though differences in sourcing between articles by men and those by women have been consistent across our three studies, these shared bylines have not, which is something we’ll continue to explore.

In review

We’ll still be doing our weekly Gender Checks for the next six months. Be sure to keep an eye out for our other monthly tallies as well as individual Gender Checks. Review past posts on Gender Check findings below:

As a note to our readers, we hope you remember that our study is still young and has some limitations. Further research is still needed. 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.

We’re interested in what you make of the findings. Share your thoughts in the comment section below or email us at genderreport@gmail.com. Stay tuned for posts coming Friday and Saturday that recap all of our findings here at The Gender Report thus far and what we’ve learned from them.

Six months: Our findings of gender representation in the New Media Index

Jasmine R. LinabaryLeave a comment

Editor’s note: Six months ago, we set out to look at how women are represented in online news both as sources and as authors. To mark our progress, this week we’re reviewing our findings as well as unveiling new statistics based on what we’ve uncovered thus far in a series of posts. View other six-month coverage here.

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“Of the most talked about articles on the web, how many feature women? How many are produced by females?”

Those were some of the questions we asked at the start of our project that led us to monitor each of the top articles in the Project for Excellence in Journalism‘s weekly New Media Index reports based on the links provided. The New Media Index presented an avenue to look for answers to these questions since it culls 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. We chose to focus in on the main top five in the blogosphere.

Each month between 12 and 29 articles could be checked, for a total of 118 articles over the six-month period between January and June 2011. Even though there were on average five subjects each week, at times more than one link was offered on the subject. In those cases, we chose to monitor the first mentioned or that which appeared based on the writing as more dominant, unless it was specifically mentioned 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.

The top news source of the links PEJ provided during this time frame was the LA Times, with more than 60 of the 118 articles we monitored, followed by the Washington Post and then the BBC. All other news sources had two or fewer articles in the sample. From 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.”

Here’s what was found:

Sourcing

Women made up 20.2 percent of sources whose gender could be identified during the first six months of the year. This calculated out to 323 male sources and 82 female sources.

The low point for female sources came in May, in which they were only 13.3 percent of sources. The high was in February with 28 percent.

Startling was the fact that 49 of the 118 articles contained no female sources at all (but did have male sources) — or 41.5 percent. Only three articles were the reverse with no male sources. Ten articles had no sources and these were mostly op-eds.

We also took a look at the number of articles with a single male vs. a single female news subject as the focus. Eighteen articles featured a single male subject, versus eight that were about a single female subject. Four of the articles were interviews. All of the interview subjects were male (an interview with Microsoft chief executive officer Steve Ballmer popped up twice but is counted once). Of the eight about women, three were about Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor and Republican political figure, and two featured GOP presidential candidate Michele Bachmann.

Authorship

A woman (or two) bylined 31.3 percent of articles by authors of one gender or the other and 26.3 percent overall. A total of 68 articles were by one or more man, 31 by one or more woman, 10 with a shared byline between a man (or several) and a woman, and nine were not bylined.

The low for female authorship occurred in May, when women made up a minuscule 11.1 percent of authors of one gender or the other. The high was again in February with women as 41.7 percent.

Nineteen articles linked to were op-ed or commentary pieces during the past six months. Only three of those were by women. One of the 19 was a staff editorial.

Seven articles were written by more than one person of the same gender. Two were shared bylines with females and five shared bylines among males.

Author gender and source selection

We also decided to take a closer look at whether the gender of the author affected the percentage of female sources.

Females made up 28.9 percent of sources in articles by women in the sample. That percentage dropped to 19.3 percent in articles by men. In articles with shared bylines between a man (or men) and a woman, 11.9 percent of sources were women.

We also examined this during our recent study of the lead articles from 40 online news outlets situated nationally in the Columbia Journalism Review’s News Frontier Database. In that study, women were 38 percent of sources in stories by women and only 10 percent of sources in stories by men. Different than the findings here, in that study the percentage of female sources in stories with a shared byline between both a man and a woman were closer to that of those by female authors, at 37 percent.

This issue is something we will continue to look at with our studies in the future.

A look back

We’ll be continuing to monitor the New Media Index for the next six months, so be sure to check back for our monthly counts. To review our past posts on our New Media Index studies, see the links below:

As a note to our readers, we hope you remember that our study is still young and has some limitations. Further research is still needed. 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.