The Byline Results are in! There are so many fascinating stats that I have to tell you about, and I will be doing so in a series of five weekly posts beginning today.
Just to catch you up, in the 12 week period from 9/15 to 12/7 I documented the op-ed articles of 10 publications, categorizing them by media type (New, Legacy, College), publication, the author’s status as staff or not staff, and subject. In total I recorded 7,073 op-eds.
The table below shows the proportion of total articles written by women in New Media (The Huffington Post and Salon), Legacy Media (NY Times, Washington Post, LA Times, and the Wall Street Journal), and College Media (Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale). As you can see, women wrote a much higher percentage of articles in College Media (College Media was at 38% compared to 20% in Legacy Media, and 33% in New Media). These numbers comport with the results of previous Byline Surveys.
When we begin to unravel these basic figures things become much more interesting:
In New Media, women wrote 33% of all articles, but they contributed just 26% of all general interest articles. This is due to the fact that 34% of the articles that women wrote about were on Pink topics.
In the Legacy Media chart below, we see that the numbers of Pink topic articles are nearly equal (men 34, women 37), but these numbers belie the disparities in the distribution of output. The 34 articles that men wrote constitute just 3% of their total output; compare that to the 14% that Pink topics composed in women’s total output.
Put another way, out of 1,410 general interest articles (politics, economy, health, education, etc.) women wrote only 261! Ouch.
Stay tuned next week when we take a look at the subjects that men and women are writing about. You won’t want to miss it.
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