{"id":62571,"date":"2014-05-27T09:00:29","date_gmt":"2014-05-27T14:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=62571"},"modified":"2014-06-28T18:27:05","modified_gmt":"2014-06-28T23:27:05","slug":"gender-at-the-new-york-times-the-most-comprehensive-analysis-ever","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2014\/05\/27\/gender-at-the-new-york-times-the-most-comprehensive-analysis-ever\/","title":{"rendered":"Gender at the NY Times: The Most Comprehensive Analysis Ever"},"content":{"rendered":"

In this post I present the most comprehensive analysis ever reported\u00a0of the gender of\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0writers (I think), with a sample of almost 30,000 articles.<\/p>\n

This subject has been in the news, with a good\u00a0piece the\u00a0other day by Liza Mundy \u2014 in the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0\u2014 who wrote\u00a0on the media\u2019s\u00a0Woman Problem<\/a>, prompted by the\u00a0latest report<\/a>\u00a0from the Women\u2019s Media Center. The WMC\u00a0checked newspapers\u2019\u00a0female byline representation from the last quarter of 2013, and found\u00a0levels ranging from a low of 31% female at the\u00a0NYT<\/em>\u00a0to a high of 46% at the\u00a0Chicago Sun-Times<\/em>. That\u2019s\u00a0a broad study\u00a0that covers a lot of other media, and worth reading.\u00a0But we can go\u00a0deeper on the\u00a0NYTimes, <\/i>thanks to the awesome data collecting powers of my colleague\u00a0Neal Caren<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Here are the results based on 21,440 articles\u00a0published online from\u00a0October\u00a023, 2013 to February\u00a025, 2014.<\/p>\n

Women\u2019s\u00a0authorship<\/strong><\/p>\n

1. Women were the first author on 34% of the articles. This is a little higher than\u00a0the WMC got with their A-section analysis, which is not surprising given the distribution of writers across sections.<\/p>\n

2. Women wrote the majority of stories in five\u00a0out of 21 major sections, from Fashion (52% women), to\u00a0Dining,\u00a0Home,\u00a0Travel, and Health (76% women). Those five\u00a0sections account for 11% of the total.<\/p>\n

3. Men wrote the majority of stories in the seven largest sections. Two sections were more than three-fourths male\u00a0(Sports, 89%;\u00a0and\u00a0Opinion, 76%). U.S., World, and Business were between 66% and 73% male.<\/p>\n

Here is the breakdown by section (click to enlarge):<\/p>\n

\"1<\/a><\/p>\n

Gender words<\/strong><\/p>\n

Since we have all this text, we can go a little beyond the section headers served up by the\u00a0NYTimes<\/em>\u2018 API. What are men and women writing about? Using the words in the headlines, I\u00a0compiled a list of those headline words with the biggest gender difference in rates of appearance.<\/p>\n

For example, \u201cChildren\u201d occurred 36 times in women\u2019s headlines, and 24 times in men\u2019s headlines. Since men used more than twice as many headline words as women, this produced a very big gender spread in favor of women for the word \u201cChildren.\u201d \u00a0On the other hand, women\u2019s headlines had 10 instances of \u201cIran,\u201d versus 85 for men. Repeating this comparison zillions of times, I generated\u00a0these lists:<\/p>\n

NYTimes<\/em>\u00a0headline\u00a0words used disproportionately in stories by<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
WOMEN<\/strong><\/td>\nMEN<\/strong><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Scene<\/td>\nUS<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Israel<\/td>\nDeal<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
London<\/td>\nBusiness<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Hotel<\/td>\nIran<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Her<\/td>\nGame<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Beauty<\/td>\nKnicks<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Children<\/td>\nCourt<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Home<\/td>\nNFL<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Women<\/td>\nBillion<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Holiday<\/td>\nNets<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Food<\/td>\nMusic<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Sales<\/td>\nCase<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Wedding<\/td>\nTest<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Museum<\/td>\nHis<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Cover<\/td>\nGames<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Quiz<\/td>\nBitcoin<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Work<\/td>\nJets<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Christie<\/td>\nChief<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
German<\/td>\nFirm<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Menu<\/td>\nNuclear<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Commercial<\/td>\nTalks<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Fall<\/td>\nEgypt<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Shoe<\/td>\nBowl<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Israeli<\/td>\nBroadway<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Family<\/td>\nOil<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Restaurant<\/td>\nShows<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Variety<\/td>\nSuper<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Cancer<\/td>\nFootball<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Artists<\/td>\nHits<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Shopping<\/td>\nUN<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Breakfast<\/td>\nFace<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Loans<\/td>\nRussia<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Google<\/td>\nUkraine<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Living<\/td>\nYankees<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Party<\/td>\nMilan<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Vows<\/td>\nMets<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Clothes<\/td>\nKerry<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Life<\/td>\nGas<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Child<\/td>\nInvestors<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Credit<\/td>\nPlans<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Health<\/td>\nCalls<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Chinese<\/td>\nFans<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
India<\/td>\nModel<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
France<\/td>\nFed<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Park<\/td>\nProtesters<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Doctors<\/td>\nTeam<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Hunting<\/td>\nTexas<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Christmas<\/td>\nPlay<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

Here is the same table arranged as a word cloud, with pink for women and blue for men (sue me), and the more disproportionate words larger (click to enlarge):<\/p>\n

\"1<\/a><\/p>\n

What does it mean?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s\u00a0just one newspaper but it matters a lot. According to\u00a0Alexa<\/a>, NYTimes.com is the 34th most popular website in the U.S., and the 119th most popular in the world \u2014 and the most popular website of a printed newspaper in the U.S. In the JSTOR database of academic scholarship, \u201cNew York Times\u201d appeared almost four-times more frequently than the next most-commonly mentioned newspaper, the\u00a0Washington Post<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Research\u00a0shows<\/a>\u00a0that when women are charge, they tend to produce better outcomes for women below them in the organizational hierarchy.\u00a0Jill Abramson, the\u00a0NYTimes<\/em>\u2018 executive editor,\u00a0is aware of this issue, and proudly told the Women\u2019s Media Center\u00a0that she had reached the \u201csignificant milestone\u201d of having a half-female news masthead (which is significant). So why are women underrepresented in such prominent\u00a0sections? \u00a0I\u2019m really wondering.\u00a0The\u00a0NYTimes<\/em>\u00a0doesn\u2019t even do as well as the national average: 41% of the\u00a055,000 \u201cNews Analysts, Reporters and Correspondents\u201d working full-time, year-round in 2012 were women.<\/p>\n

Organizational research finds that large companies are less likely to discriminate against women, and we suspect three main reasons: greater visibility to the public, which may complain about bias; greater visibility to the government, which\u00a0may enforce anti-discrimination laws; and greater use of formal personnel procedures, which limits managerial discretion and is supposed to weaken old-boy networks. Among writers, however, an informal, back-channel norm still apparently prevails \u2014 at least according to a\u00a0recent essay<\/a>\u00a0by Ann Friedman. Maybe\u00a0NYTimes<\/em>\u2018\u00a0big-company, formalized practices apply more to\u00a0departments other than those that select and hire writers.<\/p>\n

A more in-depth discussion of these findings, with details on Cohen and Caren’s research methods, can be found at Family Inequality<\/a>. Cross-posted at Pacific Standard<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\nPhilip N. Cohen is a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park, and writes the blog Family Inequality<\/a>. You can follow him on Twitter<\/a> or Facebook<\/a>.<\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In this post I present the most comprehensive analysis ever reported\u00a0of the gender of\u00a0New York Times\u00a0writers (I think), with a sample of almost 30,000 articles. This subject has been in the news, with a good\u00a0piece the\u00a0other day by Liza Mundy \u2014 in the\u00a0New York Times\u00a0\u2014 who wrote\u00a0on the media\u2019s\u00a0Woman Problem, prompted by the\u00a0latest report\u00a0from the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":287,"featured_media":62586,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[23384,55,2100,129,23624,293,76],"class_list":["post-62571","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-social-construction-discourselanguage","tag-gender","tag-gender-work","tag-media","tag-media-newsopinion","tag-social-construction","tag-work"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2014\/05\/1-3-Copy.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62571","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/287"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=62571"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62571\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":63164,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62571\/revisions\/63164"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/62586"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=62571"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=62571"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=62571"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}