gender breakdown

Percent of women in newsrooms unchanged in latest ASNE Newsroom Census

Jasmine R. Linabary3 Comments

Women continue to comprise 36.9 percent of those working full-time at daily U.S. newspapers, according to the American Society of News Editors‘ 2012 Newsroom Census. That percentage remains unchanged from 2011’s survey.

ASNE Newsroom Census 2012

This year ASNE collaborated with the Center for Advanced Social Research at the Missouri School of Journalism for its annual survey effort. ASNE, which has conducted the census since 1978, unveiled this year’s findings at its convention this week in Washington, D.C. The employment survey showed declines in total newsroom employment as well as in positions held by minorities.

Though the organization’s press release on the Newsroom Census focused on these issues, the accompanying tables depict the current gender breakdown in newsrooms. The Newsroom Census tables, which include data from 1999 to the present, show that the percentage of women in newsrooms has not changed more than roughly a percentage point in that time frame. The high was 37.7 percent in 2006 and the low occurred in 2010 at 36.6 percent. The current percentage of women in newsrooms — 36.9 percent — is the same as it was in 1999, 2003 and 2011. In the current survey, the number of women working full-time at daily newspapers was 14,971, while 25,595 employees were men.

Additionally, survey results are broken down by gender and race. Based on these charts, about 15.3 percent of female staff members in the survey were minority women. Last year, ASNE reported that minority women made up 19.3 percent of female staffers. Meanwhile, minority men were roughly 10.5 percent of male employees in the current survey. That percentage was 10.8 the year prior. This is the first year the survey has included a “multi-racial” category, which may slightly skew our understanding of changes in the breakdowns by each race (For the complete breakdown, see Table K).

A separate table tracks gender and job category. Of the four job categories identified, women had the highest representation among copy/layout editors and online producers at 42.3 percent and lowest among photographers, artists and videographers at 25.2. percent. None of the categories had more than a one percent change from the previous year. The percentage of women in three categories — supervisors, reporters and writers and photographers, artists and videographers — dropped slightly, while the percentage of female copy/layout editors and online producers rose. Two categories set records this year, with women at their highest percentage in the past 14 years for copy/layout editors and online producers but at their lowest in that same time frame among reporters and writers at 38 percent.

Find out more about the latest census using the links below to the press release as well as charts related to newsroom gender breakdowns.

Read our post on the 2011 Newsroom Census here. For more studies and resources on gender in the news media, view our “Useful Resources” page.

Advertisement

In the newsroom: A look at gender breakdowns at the Seattle Times, Seattle P-I

Jasmine R. LinabaryLeave a comment

When it comes to who gets the prominent news story byline, several factors are usually at play.

Thus far here at The Gender Report, we’ve been simply recording the gender of the authors of the articles we turn up in our weekly Gender Checks, which we pull from the articles that appear as top stories on the news sites at the time we examine those sites on that particular day. According to our first-quarter findings, women made up roughly 31 percent of authors of those news stories we examined.

In a series of posts (one from each of our geographical regions), we’re going to look at how these findings reflect the actual makeups of these news sites’ newsrooms. That will help us as we take a look at what other factors may be involved in those top-of-the-website bylines.

As a starting point for context since half of the news websites in our sample are tied to a traditional newspaper, in its most recent newsroom census, the American Society of News Editors reported that women make up 36.9 percent of those working full-time at U.S. daily newspapers.

For the sake of our study, most of our data for the breakdowns of the individual newsrooms we feature will come from what was readily available online through the news sites’ own contact and staff listing pages. From our experience in the industry, we know these aren’t always quite up to date, but it should give us a general idea of what the newsrooms look like. We’ve stuck to newsroom staff for our purposes. This may vary by news site, as some, particularly newspapers, include different staff positions on their lists.

Without further delay, in our first post in the series, here’s a look at the West.

West

In the first quarter, women bylined 26 percent of the stories we “gender checked” in the West. Six stories were by an individual woman and 17 were by one or more man.

Seattle Times

Overall, the Seattle Times newsroom and seattletimes.com staff list (accessed May 25) shows women as 45.5 percent of the staff members listed. That about matches the percentage of female bylines we found (45 percent) in our newspaper-based news sites in the first quarter, of which the Seattle Times is one. Of the articles we examined from the Seattle Times in the first quarter, five were by a woman, five by a man, two with a shared byline with a woman and one or more man, and one by contributors.

Interestingly, on the Seattle Times’ staff, women matched or slightly exceeded the number of men in the executive staff, business and technology staff and local news staff.

As was to be expected, traditionally male-dominated fields within journalism appeared as such at the Seattle Times. Sports had 13 male staff and two female, according to its online staff list. The photography staff had 13 males and three females. The investigations staff had four males and one female. Women made up the majority of the entertainment staff with seven women to three men.

Of those who are specifically listed as staff of seattletimes.com, eight were female while six were male. The managing editor of digital news and innovation has been a woman, Kathy Best, since 2007. According to her LinkedIn page, Best is now the managing editor in charge of content creation after a newsroom reorganization this spring. That same reorganization likely caused other changes on the staff list.

Seattle P-I

The Seattle P-I, formerly a newspaper until it went online only in 2009, has a much smaller staff than its newspaper competitor, the Seattle Times. Of the 20-person news staff (accessed May 25), six are female, or 30 percent. In this case, however, our findings did not match up with the staff list breakdown. During Gender Checks, only one article in the first quarter was by a woman, while 12 were by males. Overall among our online-only news sites, women had 19.1 percent of the bylines in that time frame.

The main reason for this at the P-I, by our deduction, is that we see the same byline often producing the lead stories of the day. Most of the stories given top billing on the website are crime related and, therefore, written by crime news gatherer Levi Pulkkinen. Since we pull from the top stories displayed on the website at the time we visit it to conduct our weekly Gender Checks, the male-female byline ratio in this case is more reflective of editorial choices than the actual staff makeup.

It’s noteworthy that the executive producer of the P-I is a woman, Michelle Nicolosi. She also managed the site’s transition to become online only. Other woman-held positions include news gatherer (including aerospace), producer and community editor.

Watch for the next installment in the series looking at the staff breakdowns at our monitored sites coming soon.

Second month sees decrease in female sources

Joy BaconLeave a comment

We completed our second month’s worth of Gender Checks last week and the results showed a widening gap between male and female representation in news sites.

Our findings are close to being in line with other studies that have been done on gender representation in the news, and, though the results aren’t encouraging for women, they do tell us that our process seems to be working.

Before we fill you in on the results we’d like to remind our readers that this is just a single month’s worth of data from our simple Gender Checks. We hope you understand the limitations of this data, however telling. We’ve only sampled a few articles from eight news sites. Further research is needed to verify any validity across the board.

Feb. 21 – March 21, 2011

We reviewed 30 articles, two in each Gender Check. Each geographical region had four Gender Checks, with the exception of the South, which had three (We missed one week).

For each Gender Check, we looked at two websites — one associated with a newspaper and one that was online-only. We recorded information such as 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.)

Overall, these were the findings:

Sourcing

The articles contained 99 male sources and 26 female sources, which put women at about 21 percent of the human sources referenced in these articles. This is a slightly lower percentage of female sources than the Global Media Monitoring Project found in 2010 — approximately 23 percent of the news subjects on the 84 websites monitored were women.

Here’s how it broke down by geographic region:

  • West: 23 males, 4 female (Women at 14.8 percent)
  • Northeast: 28 males, 3 females (Women at 9.6 percent)
  • Midwest: 39 males, 11 females (Women at 22 percent)
  • South: 9 male, 8 female (Women at 47 percent)

And, as an additional aspect we’re interested to study over time, here’s the breakdown by news sites associated with a traditional newspaper and those that are not.

  • Newspaper website: 41 males, 8 females (Women at 16.3 percent)
  • Online-only:  58 males, 18 females (Women at  23.6 percent)

As we did our Gender Checks this month, the context of sources is particularly useful in examining gender breakdown in sources. We focused on several stories that used government officials, or focused on traditionally male-dominated fields such as law or the financial sector.  It’s an aspect of this issue that we’ll continue to look at in the future. Also important to note is that a decreased number of sources makes for more dramatic data points.

Authorship

Overall, 9 articles were written by an individual woman and 18 by a single man. In addition, two articles had a shared byline with a man and a woman.

Here’s a look by geographic region:

  • West: 1 by an individual woman, 6 by a man, 1 by a man and a woman (1 by contributors)
  • Northeast: 1 by a woman, 6 by a man
  • Midwest: 5 by a woman, 3 by men
  • South: 2 by a woman, 3 by men, 1 by a man and a woman

And, here’s the look by news website association:

  • Newspaper website: 7 by a woman, 5 by a man, 2 by a man and a woman
  • Online-only: 2 by a woman, 13 by a man

When looking at the gender gap in the authors, we’ll also need to keep in mind the make-up of the individual news website’s staff and who is on duty to publish to the web on the day we do our Gender Checks each week. Those factors could play a role in our final results and are elements we’ll be looking into in the future.

Check out how this data compares to last month’s Gender Report on sources and authorship.

We’ll be posting our results like this on a monthly and quarterly basis. As time goes by, we’ll be looking for other trends, including the subjects featured as lead articles on these news websites and what kind of correlation that may have to the gender of the author and the sources. We’ll also be seeking out and sharing the existing explanations on why we see the trends we do.

This is only the beginning of the data we hope to gather here at The Gender Report. Stay tuned for our weekly Gender Checks from each region. Additionally, we’ll be exploring other ways of looking at gender representation in the news in coming posts.

We’re also interested in your feedback. How are we doing? What information are you interested in when it comes to gender representations in online news? Share your thoughts in the comment section below or e-mail us at genderreport@gmail.com.