The Most Comprehensive Analysis Ever of the Gender of New York Times Writers
Women’s authorship
1. Women were the first author on 34% of the articles. This is a little higher than the WMC got with their A-section analysis, which is not surprising given the distribution of writers across sections.
2. Women wrote the majority of stories in five out of 21 major sections, from Fashion (52% women ), to Dining, Home, Travel, and Health (76% women). Those five sections account for 11% of the total.
3. Men wrote the majority of stories in the seven largest sections. Two sections were more than three-fourths male (Sports, 89%; and Opinion, 76%). U.S., World, and Business were between 66% and 73% male.
What does it mean?
It’s just one newspaper but it matters a lot. According to Alexa, NYTimes.com is the 34th most popular website in the U.S., and the 119th most popular in the world — and the most popular website of a printed newspaper in the U.S. In the JSTOR database of academic scholarship, “New York Times” appeared almost four-times more frequently than the next most-commonly mentioned newspaper, the Washington Post.
Research (including this paper I wrote with Matt Huffman and Jessica Pearlman) shows that women in charge, on average, produce better outcomes for women below them in the organizational hierarchy. Jill Abramson, the NYTimes’ executive editor, is the 19th most powerful woman in the world, behind only Sheryl Sandberg and Oprah Winfrey among media executives on that list. She is aware of this issue, and proudly told the Women’s Media Center that she had reached the “significant milestone” of having a half-female news masthead (which is significant). So why are women underrepresented in such prominent sections? That’s not a rhetorical question; I’m really wondering how this happens. The NYTimes doesn’t even do as well as the national average: 41% of the 55,000 “News Analysts, Reporters and Correspondents” working full-time, year-round in 2012 were women.
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