Well folks, the Byline Survey is coming to a close. Every day for almost three months, I’ve been checking the op-ed pages of six different papers and counting how many women op-ed contributors there are on each day. The final numbers are almost in – there are two weeks still to go, but we already have ten weeks’ worth of data to look at. So let’s look at them. Here are the raw numbers:
| TOTAL | HuffPost | LA Times | NYT | Salon | WaPo | WSJ |
| Total op-eds | 1479 | 100 | 82 | 76 | 72 | 136 |
| Op-eds by women | 301 | 30.33 | 17.75 | 7 | 10.5 | 8.75 |
| %age | 20.35 | 30.33 | 21.64 | 9.21 | 14.58 | 6.43 |
So, what’s going on here? Well, first of all, not one paper is at 50% women. No paper is even close. The LA Times comes the closest, but even there, less than 1/3 of the op-eds they publish are written by women. And, as you can see, the other papers trail the LA Times by almost 10%, if not more. By far the most disappointing is The Wall Street Journal, with only 6.43%, but Salon isn’t that far ahead of the WSJ.
It’s also interesting to note that being an online publication doesn’t necessarily mean more women – Salon’s 9.2% is more than doubled by HuffPo’s 20.3%. Sort of makes you question the theory that the online revolution has made media representation more democratic and equal, doesn’t it?
Stay tuned for more findings from the Byline Survey, including our final numbers for the entire three-month survey period.
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Wow, this is eye opening. But even though the numbers are discouraging, isn’t the bigger question: How many submissions came from women, and how many came from men to arrive at those numbers?
If not that many of us females submitted op ed pieces, then these numbers you provided really aren’t an accurate reflection of the situation, right?
Hi Connie, nice to hear from you! You make a good point, which is that we don’t have a full picture of the situation without knowing how many women submit. But we do have a full and accurate picture of how many women are being published, and that’s what this survey was about.