sourcing

Report Your Thoughts: What’s the solution?

Jasmine R. LinabaryLeave a comment

Editor’s note: Our findings through our monitoring projects have served to identify and bring attention to the fact that women’s voices are missing, but have left us with more questions than answers. That’s why we’re taking our project a step further by starting a discussion on why this is the case and what can be done about it. This is part of a series of posts each week aiming to start a discussion on gender representations in online news. View past “Report Your Thoughts” discussions here.

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Question 4: What’s the solution?

Now that we’ve discussed (mostly via the Twitter hashtag #GRdiscuss) the reasons why women are absent as sources and authors of the news as well as why it matters that women are included, we’d like to shift the focus to how we can effect change in this area.

So, what’s the solution? Women make up a quarter or less of news sources and slightly over a third of news authors. What are some ways to increase the percentage of women included as news sources and increase the number of female reporters in the newsroom and with lead bylines?

Share your thoughts in the comment section as well as on Twitter with the hashtag #GRdiscuss or on our Facebook page.

Update: Discussion of this week’s question so far as mostly taken place on Twitter with the #GRdiscuss hashtag.

Here are some snapshots of the discussion:

Gender Check breakdown: A look at source order and gender

Jasmine R. LinabaryLeave a comment

From the initial six-month findings of our Gender Check monitoring project in July, we know that women made up 25.3 percent of sources in the articles we examined. While this tells us the representation given to women at a basic level, it does not reveal how prominently those voices were used within stories. In other words, was the first source in a story — a position of more weight in some respects — more likely to male than female or the other way around?

Now that we’ve had more time to spend with our data, we’ve sought to address this issue. And what we’ve found thus far shows us there are at least some small signs of a lack of prominence of women sources when they do appear in online news articles.

At the six-month mark, we had examined 190 articles, all but three of which had one or more sources. Less than 10 percent of articles had nine or more sources.The most sources a story had was 25 — an article in June from ProPublica about the criminal justice process in murder cases involving children.

Thirty articles (or 15.8 percent) were single source stories. That source was male in 20 of the articles, female in eight and unidentified in two.

The number of female sources only exceeded that of male sources twice: when we were down to two articles at source No. 21 and down to one article at source No. 25. Female sources only exceeded 40 percent at two other times – source No. 16 (four articles) and source No. 22 (two articles).

The first source of the articles in our sample was only female 20.5 percent of the time, but the percentage of third sources that were female jumped to 30.2 percent and the percent of last sources that were female was slightly higher still at 33.1 percent.

Here are the basic findings for the first five sources in a story as well as the last source in the articles.

  • First source: 20.5 percent female (in 187 articles)
  • Second source: 25.4 percent female (in 157 articles)
  • Third source: 30.2 percent female (in 119 articles)
  • Fourth source: 20 percent female (in 85 articles)
  • Fifth source: 24.1 percent female (in 58 articles)
  • Last source: 33.1 percent female (in 157 articles – not including single source stories)

We also looked at expert and non-expert sources of both genders. An expert source is an official or public figure, a person in position of authority or someone with significant knowledge on the subject.

A larger percentage of the female sources referenced in these articles were non-experts compared to male sources. Non-experts made up 34 percent of female sources and only 14.7 percent of male sources. Overall, 26.1 percent of sources were non-experts.

While the number of male non-expert sources never surpassed that of male expert sources, the number of female non-experts exceeded that of female experts at source seven and in 10 more source numbers after that up to No. 25.

These findings in particular raise more questions for us. Does this reflect a lack of female experts as a whole or is something different at work?

We’ll be continuing to watch for trends that emerge in source prominence over time as our study progresses. We’d like to hear from you: What did you find most surprising or interesting about these results? Why do you think there is a higher percentage of female sources that are non-experts than males?

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

Report Your Thoughts: Where are the women? (Part 2)

Jasmine R. LinabaryLeave a comment

Editor’s note: Our findings through our monitoring projects have served to identify and bring attention to the fact that women’s voices are missing, but have left us with more questions than answers. That’s why we’re taking our project a step further by starting a discussion on why this is the case and what can be done about it. This is part of a series of posts each week aiming to start a discussion on gender representations in online news. View past “Report Your Thoughts” discussions here.

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Question 2: Where are the women (as sources)?

Last week we launched our “Report Your Thoughts” discussion series with the basic question about our findings: Why? Why are women present in such low numbers in our byline counts of lead articles as well as our looks inside newsrooms? (View this discussion post as well as some of the comments here.)

This week, we’d like to look at a related question: Why are women’s voices absent among news sources?

Here are some facts:

-The Global Media Monitoring Project (2010) found that overall in a study of media platforms from 100 countries that 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.

-At the six-month mark, we’ve found that women make up only 25.3 percent of sources in lead articles on online news sites in our Gender Check study. That percentage is even lower in the most linked to and discussed articles of the web in the New Media Index, where women are only 20.2 percent of sources. Women didn’t fair much better in our sample of lead articles from the 40 “national” sites in the News Frontier Database. In that study, women were 22 percent of sources.

So, in most studies, women are a quarter or fewer of news sources. Why is that?

We want to hear from you. What do you make of these findings. Why is this the case? Share your thoughts in the comment section as well as on Twitter with the hashtag #GRdiscuss or on our Facebook page.

So, for the second week, we ask: Where are the women?

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.