Welcome to a new week at the Byline Blog! Last week was our first week of tracking op-ed bylines in the nation’s most influential papers. The findings were fascinating.
The strongest performer by far was The Los Angeles Times: exactly 50% of its op-eds were written by women. Not far was Salon, with 33.3%.
After that, the numbers drop off a bit, with The Huffington Post at 17%, The New York Times at 16.6% and The Washington Post at 15%.
In last place was The Wall Street Journal, which in the week of August 10, published not a single woman-penned op-ed. Not one.
Granted, one week does not a sample size make, but I have to wonder, when I look at The LA Times and The Wall Street Journal: are we seeing the beginnings of a pattern?
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i posted a link to your blog on facebook and it seems that the unknown intent of this research raises questions for people. One question….are you interested in the content as well as the volume of published pieces by women? One woman said that basically regardless of the number of women written pieces in the LA Times, that it was still a ridiculous paper. So, now I’m curious about the kinds of conclusions you may be hoping to make with this research? Any info. is appreciated.
Hi Sherisa,
Thanks for linking to us! Now to your questions:
The intent of this research is to count the number of female bylines on the op-ed pages, to observe any changes since the last time a study of this kind was done, which was in 2005, and to try to explain those changes. We aren’t focusing on content, though that might be an interesting next step.
As for the kinds of conclusions we hope to make – we won’t start thinking about conclusions until we’ve collected all the data. Hopefully, we’ll find that things have improved since 2005, but who knows? Stay tuned on the blog for more numbers and analysis.