Women Are Seen More than Heard in Online Newspapers

Abstract

Feminist news media researchers have long contended that masculine news values shape journalists’ quotidian decisions about what is newsworthy. As a result, it is argued, topics and issues traditionally regarded as primarily of interest and relevance to women are routinely marginalised in the news, while men’s views and voices are given privileged space. When women do show up in the news, it is often as “eye candy,” thus reinforcing women’s value as sources of visual pleasure rather than residing in the content of their views. To date, evidence to support such claims has tended to be based on small-scale, manual analyses of news content. In this article, we report on findings from our large-scale, data-driven study of gender representation in online English language news media. We analysed both words and images so as to give a broader picture of how gender is represented in online news. The corpus of news content examined consists of 2,353,652 articles collected over a period of six months from more than 950 different news outlets. From this initial dataset, we extracted 2,171,239 references to named persons and 1,376,824 images resolving the gender of names and faces using automated computational methods. We found that males were represented more often than females in both images and text, but in proportions that changed across topics, news outlets and mode. Moreover, the proportion of females was consistently higher in images than in text, for virtually all topics and news outlets; women were more likely to be represented visually than they were mentioned as a news actor or source. Our large-scale, data-driven analysis offers important empirical evidence of macroscopic patterns in news content concerning the way men and women are represented.

Content analysis of 150 years of British periodicals

“…It is interesting to note that the relative proportion of men and women is not very different in today's news (17). Additional analysis with more sophisticated methods is reported below, supporting this conclusion.…”

“…This more refined approach also shows a slow but steady increase of the presence of women after 1900. These results can be read in combination with analogous ones for modern news (17), showing that gender bias within the media does not seem to have changed very much, with approximately three times as many males as females in modern newspapers.…”

“…1, and that newspapers provide increased clarity to the analysis of these events that may not be possible in other cultural forms, such as books. We further showed that the approach can reveal or confirm ways in which news media represent particular people or issues over time, as evidenced by the existence of a gender bias that is still present in the media today (17), and that historical trends in public discourse can be made accessible through the same means.…”

“…Although performance of the tools cannot be assessed on the historical corpus (for lack of a "ground truth"), each tool does, however, achieve high performance on benchmarking tasks, with AIDA reporting a mean average precision of 89.05% on the Association for Computational Linguistics' Special Interest Group on Natural Language Learning Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL) 2003 dataset (25), and our entity extraction tool based on the ANNIE plugin for GATE achieved an accuracy of 97.1% on news media from the web (17). Furthermore, for each of the tools, we developed quality control checks and filters to ensure that we only keep the predictions for which we have a high level of confidence, because it should be noted that these tools are not specifically trained on digitized historical newspapers.…”

Cancer In The News: Bias And Quality In Media Reporting Of Cancer Research

“…Female scientists face a suite of documented biases [38][39][40][41], and a number of studies have established that women are under-represented in news media [42,43]. More specifically, the systematic under-recognition of female scientists -known as the Matilda effect [44] -has been demonstrated in science communication, where publications from male authors are associated with greater perceived scientific quality [45].…”