Women’s Portrayal in News

According to a report by Media Matters for America, the guests on Sunday morning talk television shows -- which garner some 12 million viewers every week -- are predominately white men. Media Matters, a media watchdog group, studied the 2005 and 2006 guest lists of NBC's Meet the Press, ABC's This Week, CBS' Face the Nation, and Fox Broadcasting Co.'s Fox News Sunday. On average, men outnumbered women by a 4-to-1 ratio.

A second Media Matters report documented the continuing lack of women and minorities in prime-time cable news programs. The three-week study of MSNBC, Fox News Channel, and CNN’s nightly news shows found that hosts and guests are still overwhelmingly male and white. Of the 35 hosts and co-hosts, 29 were men, and all were white, according to the report. Women did not make up at least half of the guests on a single one of the three cable networks, and on some networks they comprised as little as 18 percent. (Media Matters for America, May 2007)

Women in Congress received fewer total newspaper articles, fewer mentions in front-page, national, foreign, metro, business and sports articles, fewer issue-based articles and fewer mentions and quotes in newspaper articles than their male counterparts (Anat Maytal, Media Report to Women, Summer 2005)

Women’s Portrayal in Television Entertainment

During the 2007-2008 primetime television season:

On screen, females accounted for 43% of all characters last season, up one percentage point from the 2006-07 season. This figure represents a historical high. However, female characters continued to be significantly younger than their male counterparts. For example, 70% of all characters in their 50s and 61% of all characters in their 60s were male. Females 40 and older comprised 11% of all characters. In contrast, males 40 and older accounted for 21% of all characters. (“Boxed In,” Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film, San Diego State University, 2008)

The number of sexual scenes on television has nearly doubled since 1998. And while the inclusion of references to “safer sex” issues – such as waiting to have sex, using protection, or possible consequences of unprotected sex – has also increased since 1998, that rate has leveled off in recent years. This study examined a representative sample of more than 1,000 hours of programming including all genres other than daily newscasts, sports events, and children’s shows. All sexual content was measured, including talk about sex and sexual behavior. The study found that 70% of all shows include some sexual content, and that these shows average 5.0 sexual scenes per hour, compared to 56% and 3.2 scenes per hour respectively in 1998, and 64% and 4.4 scenes per hour in 2002. These increases combined represent nearly twice as many scenes of sexual content on TV since 1998 (going from 1,930 to 3,780 scenes in the program sample totaling a 96% increase between 1998 and 2005). But despite these overall increases in sexual content, the number of shows in which sexual intercourse is either depicted or strongly implied is down slightly in recent years (7% in 1998, 14% in 2002, and 11% in 2005). (Kaiser Family Foundation, 2005)

Women’s Use of the Internet

eMarketer estimates that there will be an estimated 97.2 million female Internet users ages 3 and older in 2007, or 51.7% of the total online population. In 2011, 109.7 million US females will go online, amounting to 51.9% of the total online population (eMarketer.com, March 2007)

Though men are early adopters of technology, women dominate social media. Women between ages 35 and 50 are the fastest-growing segment. (Rapleaf.com, 2007)

Women Pursuing Media Careers

The percentage of women in daily newsrooms decreased slightly from 37.58% to 37.36%. This percentage has gone up and down since 2001 when women made up 37.35 of newsroom professionals, about what they do now. Minority women decreased slightly to 17.16%. In 2001, minority women represented 14.28 percent of newsroom journalists. In terms of positions held, men dominate: 64.8 percent of all supervisors are men. They are also 58.2 percent of all copy editors, 60.9 percent of reporters and 72.9 percent of photographers (American Society of Newspaper Editors, 2008)

The second “Racial and Gender Report card of the Associated Press Sports Editors,” covering 378 AP newspapers, has given APSE newspapers and web sites a C for racial hiring practices and an F for gender hiring practices. Sports journalist jobs are overwhelmingly white and male. Women are just 6% of sports editors, 10% of assistant sports editors, 6% of columnists, 9% of reporters and 16% of copy editors/designers. (APSE, 2008)

In 2006, 28% of all U.S. broadcast network (ABC, CBS, NBC) evening newscast stories were reported by women, the highest level of visibility for female correspondents since this monitoring study began in 1990, when women reported just 13% of the stories aired on evening news shows. (Center for Media and Public Affairs, 2007)

At 40.2 percent, there was no significant change in the percentage of women in the television news workforce in 2007, but the number of women news directors reached an all-time high of 28.3 percent. Furthermore, women are as likely to be found as news directors in the largest markets as in the smallest, something that has not been the case in the past.

In radio, the picture for women was not as good. The percentage of women fell again in 2007 from 24.4 percent to 22.7 percent. The percentage among news directors also fell back to the 2005 levels of 20 percent after rising to 23.5 percent in 2006. (Radio-Television News Directors Association, 2008)

“Women @ the Box Office” debunks the notion that films made by women or featuring female protagonists earn less at the box office than those made by or featuring males. When female and male filmmakers have similar budgets for their films, the resulting domestic, international and opening weekend box office grosses – as well as DVD sales – are also similar. (Center for study of Women in Television and Film, San Diego State University, 2008)

Bylines in the nation’s top intellectual and political magazines are heavily male. In an analysis of 11 magazines published between October 2003 and May 2005), male-to-female byline ratios ranged from 13-1 at the National Review to 7-1 at Harper’s and The Weekly Standard to 2-1 at the Columbia Journalism Review. (Columbia Journalism Review, July-August 2005)

Women have been the majority of college journalism majors since 1977 (Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication)

Women fare somewhat better in pursuing communication jobs. In 2007, female journalism and mass communication graduates were more likely to have found fulltime employment than their male classmates, as they have every year since 1987. (Cox Center for International Mass Communication Training and Research, University of Georgia, 2008)

Statistics compiled by Sheila Gibbons, Editor
Media Report To Women

Updated February 2009