women in news

Week of the Year: A look at our Week in Review

Joy BaconLeave a comment

When we started this project, one of our big goals was to bring more attention to not only the lack of women in the newsroom, but also to the lack of women in the news. One of the ways we did this was through our Week in Review, a post each weekend that rounded up coverage about one or two big trending stories that either featured female subjects or women’s issues both domestically and abroad. Here are some of our larger trends from our 34 posts in this category:

Top 5 Week in Review posts:

  1. “Week in Review: Women Journalists in the News” (Dec. 3, 2011) – A look at prominent cases of harassment and violence against female journalists working abroad.
  2. “Women breaking journalism’s glass ceiling: The ascent of Jill Abramson and others” (June 11, 2011) – Ms. Abramson took over as executive editor of the New York Times.
  3. “Supreme Court decision in Wal-Mart case brings out discussions about sex discrimination, re-emergence of ERA” (June 25, 2011) – The Supreme Court ruled against the filing of a class action lawsuit against the retail giant.
  4. “Concerns expressed over victim blaming in New York Times article on gang rape (Updated)” (March 12, 2011) – a story about a teenage girl in Texas found critics questioning the media’s coverage of the rape’s circumstances and the girl’s clothing and behavior.
  5. “The Debate: Is News Coverage of Michele Bachmann sexist?” (Aug. 13, 2011) – The former candidate for the GOP primary faced many stories involving her gender and its relationship to her leadership style and capabilities.

Not surprisingly, the stories our readers explored the most had to do with women in the media itself, rather than media stories that happened to be about women. Other media coverage of the Arab Spring, the continued debates about Planned Parenthood, other healthcare issues, and the politics of gender issues internationally also found and held our attention.

As we move forward, we welcome your feedback about the focuses of these Week in Review posts. Check out daily stories on our News Feed on Twitter and on the right side of our home page. Find a story we missed? Tweet it @GRNewsFeed or post it to our Facebook page.

In the coming year, we also plan to add a weekly news poll to our site to get more feedback and your voices involved in the discussion. Look for our first poll this week.

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Recap: A look at The Gender Report’s first year by the numbers

Jasmine R. Linabary1 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 our first year of operation, we spent time looking at representations of sex and gender in Internet news through our own studies and as well as those by others. To review what we’ve accomplished and what it says about the state of women in online journalism, we’ve updated our effort at the six-month mark to pull together our stats through a roundup list as well as some graphs (Scroll below the slideshow for the full list of stats plus links). Here’s our recap as well as a good way to check out our work if you are new to The Gender Report.

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Gender Checks

Through our weekly Gender Checks, which started the week of Jan. 18 and were our cornerstone study, we looked at a total of eight U.S. news websites (one associated with a traditional newspaper and another that is online-only), two from each of the four geographic regions. In that study, we’ve found the following:

–Month 1: Women as 27.6 percent of sources and with 32.3 percent of bylines (of articles by a person or several of one gender or the other, not including shared bylines between a woman and a man)
–Month 2: Women as 20.8 percent of sources and with 33.3 percent of bylines
–Month 3: Women as 23.5 percent of sources and with 26.9 percent of bylines
–Three month totals: Women as 24.6 percent of sources and with 31 percent of bylines
–Month 4: Women as 30.4 percent of sources and with 57.1 percent of bylines
–Month 5: Women as 19.5 percent of sources and with 33.3 percent of bylines
–Month 6: Women as 27 percent of sources and with 43.3 percent of bylines
–Six month totals: Women as 25.3 percent of sources and with 37.7 percent of bylines (34.7% overall)
–Month 7: Women as 24.6 percent of sources and with 35 percent of bylines
–Month 8: Women as 24.3 percent of sources and with 44.8 percent of bylines
–Month 9: Women as 27 percent of sources and with 25 percent of bylines
–Nine month totals: Women as 25.3 percent of sources and with 41.9 percent of bylines
–Month 10: Women as 25.5 percent of sources and with 29 percent of bylines
–Month 11: Women as 34.4 percent of sources and with 31.8 percent of bylines
–Month 12: Women as 24.4 percent of sources and with 27.3 percent of bylines
–One year totals: Women as 26 percent of sources and with 35.3 percent of bylines (32.2 percent overall)

In addition to the basic findings related female sources and authors from this study’s monitoring, we also have explored the role of the articles’ subject and of source order as it relates to gender representation. See the links provided below:

Article subject:

-Six months: Gender Check breakdown: A look at female authors, sources by article subject
-Nine months: Science and health articles showing high female sources, low female bylines
-One year: One year: A look at female authors, sources by article subject in Gender Check study

Source order:

-Six months: Gender Check breakdown: A look at source order and gender
-One year: One year: Examining the prominence of female sources in Gender Check study

New Media Index

In addition, we’ve also been examining the sourcing and authorship from the most linked to and talked about articles on the web, via the Project for Excellence in Journalism’s New Media Index:

–January 2011: Women as 21.3 percent of sources and with 33.3 percent of bylines (of articles by a person or several of one gender or the other, not including shared bylines between a woman and a man)
–February 2011: Women as 28 percent of sources and with 41.7 percent of bylines
–March 2011: Women as 15.2 percent of sources and with 28.6 percent of bylines
–April 2011: Women as 25 percent of sources and with 28.6 percent of bylines
–May 2011: Women as 13.3 percent of sources and with 11.1 percent of bylines
–June 2011: Women as 20.2 percent of sources and with 36 percent of bylines
–Six months: Women as 20.2 percent of sources and with 31.3 percent of bylines (26.3 percent overall)
–July 2011: Women as 15 percent of sources and with 50 percent of bylines
–August 2011: Women as 14.1 percent of sources and with 10 percent of bylines
–September 2011: Women as 17.6 percent of sources and with 9.5 percent of bylines
–October 2011: Women as 25 percent of sources and with 15 percent of bylines
–November 2011: Women as 27.2 percent of sources and with 10.5 percent of bylines
–December 2011: Women as 15 percent of sources and with 10 percent of bylines
–One year: Women as 19.1 percent of sources and with 23 percent of bylines (19.6 percent overall)

News Frontier Database

We’ve also spent some time looking at the information that can be gleaned through or as an off-shoot of the Columbia Journalism Review’s News Frontier Database.

  • Women made up 28 percent of the “principal staff” of online news outlets (as of June 3, 2011)
  • Women were 22 percent of sources and bylined 30 percent of articles overall in a July 1 sample of the lead articles from the 40 “national” online news outlets in the database.

The Gender Report got a shout-out for these studies from Michael Meyer who is in charge of the database during an interview he did with the media blog 10,000 Words in July.

Newsroom staff breakdowns

To look at gender representations in news creation in a different way aside from a byline count, we’ve been taking stock of the breakdown in each newsroom of the news sites included in our Gender Check monitoring via their online staff lists:

West: (As of May 25, 2011)

  • Seattle Times: Women as 45.5 percent of staff.
  • Seattle P-I: Women as 30 percent of staff.

Midwest: (As of June 22, 2011)

  • St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Women as 31.3 percent of staff.
  • St. Louis Beacon: Women as 60 percent of staff.

*Data from the Northeast and the South still to come.

Author gender and source selection

We’ve also looked at whether the author’s gender affected the use of female sources in our different studies. Here’s what each of these studies showed:

–News Frontier Database “national site study: Women were 38 percent of sources in articles by females and 10 percent of sources in articles by males. Women were 37 percent of sources in those articles with a shared byline by a male and a female.

–New Media Index study: Women were 25.1 percent of sources in articles by females and 18.1 percent of sources in articles by males. Women were only 16.7 percent of sources in articles with a shared byline by a male (or several) and a female.

–Gender Check study: Women were 28.3 percent of sources in articles by females and 24 percent of sources in articles by males. Women were 28.7 percent of sources in articles with a shared byline by a male (or several) and a female.

This issue is one that we’ll continue to look at in the future, particularly because of the differences we are seeing in the shared bylines.

Other studies

For a comparison, here’s what some other studies on the subject of women and journalism (some specifically related to newspapers and some to online outlets) have uncovered:

–American Society of News Editors: 2011 Newsroom Census: Women made up 36.9 percent of those working full time at daily U.S. newspapers.

-International Women’s Media Foundation’s “The Global Report on the Status of Women in the News Media” (Released March 2011): Women currently hold 27 percent of top management jobs and 26 percent of governing jobs in the news media globally. Women hold 36 percent of reporter jobs, or positions at the “junior professional level” and 41 percent of positions at the senior professional level, which includes anchors, senior writers and producers.

–Global Media Monitoring Project (2010): Overall, 37 percent of stories were reported by women, and 36 percent of stories in the online samples were bylined by women. 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.

Our take

Check back on The Gender Report for our take on what we’ve learned during our first year and what we hope to accomplish in the second.

One year: Examining the prominence of female sources in Gender Check study

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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As we unveiled earlier this week, women made up 26 percent of human sources referenced in the articles we monitored as part of our Gender Check project. This percentage gives us a general idea of representation of women’s voices in the news, but it does not reveal how prominently these voices were incorporated. We’ve explored our data a little more indepthly so that we can address this issue and questions such as this: Was the first source in a story – a position of more weight in some respects — even more likely to male than female?

We looked at this after the six-month mark of our study, and found were at least some small signs of a lack of prominence of women sources in the online news articles we monitored. After a year, we find similar evidence.

In our year-long study, we had examined 354 articles from eight U.S. online news websites (for more details on the study, click here). Thirty-one of the articles contained no human sources. Less than 10 percent of articles had nine or more sources. The most sources a story had, as was true at the six-month point, was 25 — an article in June from ProPublica about the criminal justice process in murder cases involving children.

Roughly 15.5 percent, or 55 articles, were single-source stories. That source was male in 35 of the articles, female in 18 and unidentified in two. That made women 32.7 percent of sources in single-source stories.

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 one-third at two other times – source No. 16 (five articles) and source No. 22 (two articles). This has remained consistent since since the six-month mark.

The first source of the articles in our sample was female 23.5 percent of the time, but the percentage of sources that were female jumped 5 or 6 percentage points for the second and third sources and then dropped back down to 21.2 percent for the fourth source.

Here’s what we found for the first five sources in a story as well as the last source in the articles.

  • First source: 23.5 percent female (in 323 articles)
  • Second source: 29.5 percent female (in 268 articles)
  • Third source: 28.3 percent female (in 205 articles)
  • Fourth source: 21.2 percent female (in 151 articles)
  • Fifth source: 25.9 percent female (in 108 articles)
  • Last source: 29 percent female (in 269 articles – not including single source stories)

In addition to the order of sources, we also examined the number of 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.

In the articles we monitored, a larger portion of the female sources referenced in were non-experts compared to male sources. Non-experts made up 29.2 percent of female sources but just 14.1 percent of male sources. Overall, 17.9 percent of sources were non-experts.

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? Share your thoughts in the comment section below or using the #GRdiscuss hashtag on Twitter.

For more results from our year-long Gender Check project revealed this week, review the links below:

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

Women byline 32.2% of lead news articles in year-long Gender Check study

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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Women bylined 32.2 percent of all articles monitored in a year-long study of eight news websites.

This finding was based on the results of The Gender Report’s Gender Check project that aims to monitor gender representations in online news. In this study, we monitored the lead articles from two websites — one associated with a newspaper and one considered online-only — in each of the four geographic regions as defined by the U.S. Census. The websites we examined included the Seattle Times, Seattle P-I, New York Times, ProPublica, Stltoday.com, St. Louis Beacon, Miami Herald and Patch (Seminole Heights).

On a weekly basis, we selected 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.)

This project began in January 2011 and concluded earlier this month. For the purposes of this study, this made a total of 53 weeks, but due to a missing week, resulted in a total of 52 weeks of monitoring for at least two of our geographic regions. Between Jan. 18, 2011 and Jan. 19, 2012, we examined a total of 354 articles, averaging about 29.5 articles per month. In total, this broke down to 104 articles each from the West and Midwest regions, 78 articles from the Northeast and 68 articles from the South. These lower counts in the Northeast and South are the result of missed weeks. Though this may have have some slight affect on the overall findings, the standings of these regions among the others have remained consistent over time. Earlier today we released the first findings from this study regarding sources in these news articles, reporting that women were 26 percent of human sources referenced overall.

When it came to bylines, women wrote 114 of the articles in our study, while men wrote 209. Twenty-five articles had a shared byline between a man (or men) and a woman. Six articles were by contributors, staff or unbylined. These totals mean women bylined 32.2 percent of articles in our study, and 35.3 percent of articles by a person (or persons) of one gender or the other.

Twenty-two articles in our sample were written by more than one man, while only one article was bylined by more than one woman.

In only one month of our study did 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. The lowest percentage of female bylines came in month nine, when women byline 25 percent of articles by authors of one gender or the other and 21.4 percent overall.

Geographic regions

In terms of geographic regions, our sites from the Northeast have continued to hold the lowest percentage of female bylines with 24.4 percent of the articles overall. In our sites from the South, women were nearest parity at 42.6 percent.

  • West: 29 stories by one or more woman, 68 by one or more man, four with a shared byline between a man and a woman, three by contributors or staff (Women at 27.9 percent overall)
  • Northeast: 19 by an individual woman, 47 by one or more man, 12 with a shared byline (Women at 24.4 percent overall)
  • Midwest: 37 by a woman, 58 by one or more man, seven with a shared byline, two by staff (Women at 35.6 percent overall)
  • South: 29 by a woman, 36 by one or more man, two with a shared byline, one unknown (Women at 42.6 percent overall)

Newspaper vs. online-only websites

As we’ve discovered throughout our study, though newspaper-connected sites may have fewer female sources than their online-only counterparts, they do fair a bit better than them when it comes to female bylines. Of the articles from newspaper sites in our study, women byline 38.2 percent of articles by a person(s) of one gender or the other and 33.9 percent overall. This compared to 32.5 percent and 30.5 percent respectively at online-only outlets. This trend held true in all geographic regions, except the Northeast, where ProPublica had a higher percentage of female bylines than the New York Times.

  • Newspaper website: 60 by a woman, 97 by one or more man, 17 with shared bylines between a man and woman, three by contributors/staff (Women at 33.9 percent overall)
  • Online-only: 54 by a woman, 112 by one or more man, eight with shared bylines, three by contributors/staff (Women at 30.5 percent overall)

Individual news websites

The New York Times had the lowest percentage of female bylines overall at 17.95 percent. We did have one site — the Miami Herald — that at the time of our study’s completion showed women as 50 percent of bylines overall.

We want to note that when broken down by each individual news site, our sample size is still small so readers should keep that in mind. More research will be needed to determine whether these percentages are indeed accurate for the individual sites. For now, this is what we’ve found:

  • Seattle Times: 17 by a woman, 31 by one or more man, three with shared bylines, one by contributors/staff (Women at 33 percent overall)
  • Seattle P-I: 12 by a woman, 37 by one or more man, one with a shared byline, two by contributors/staff (Women at 23.1 percent overall)
  • New York Times: Seven by a woman, 25 by one or more man, seven with shared bylines (Women at 17.95 percent overall)
  • ProPublica: 12 by a woman, 22 by one or more man, five with shared bylines (Women at 30.8 percent overall)
  • Stltoday.com: 19 by a woman, 26 by one or more man, five with shared bylines, two by contributors/staff (Women at 36.5 percent overall)
  • St. Louis Beacon: 18 by a woman, 32 by one or more man, two with shared bylines (Women at 34.6 percent overall)
  • Miami Herald: 17 by a woman, 15 by one or more man, two with shared bylines (Women at 50 percent overall)
  • Patch (Seminole Heights): 12 by a woman, 21 by one or more man, one unknown (Women at 35.3 percent overall)

Review findings

Later this week, we’ll be providing a recap of all of our write-ups related to this study’s findings. We’ll also be looking at our Gender Check project data by article subject and by source order.

As a note to our readers, this study does have some limitations. This data simply reflects our findings from eight news websites and results should not be assumed to represent all sites in the regions or the industry as a whole. Further research is needed to confirm or elaborate on these findings, which is something we’ll be looking to do in year two. Stay tuned for more.

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 using the #GRdiscuss hashtag on Twitter.