2013 Media Monitoring Research
Major dailies publishing more women experts in 2013 vs 2010
In a survey of the editorial pages of four major English-language Canadian daily newspapers earlier this spring, the amount of space devoted to female commentators’ perspectives appeared to increase significantly over a similar study conducted three years ago. Whereas opinion pieces written by women in the Globe and Mail, National Post, Ottawa Citizen and Toronto Star accounted for only 11% of those published in a period sampled in 2010, data collected in February – March of this year showed a doubling to 22% of all op eds.
The Ottawa Citizen’s data remained consistent between the two periods (about 28%) – and the highest among the four papers), but op eds written by women increased in the Globe and Mail and the National Post from 8% and 9% respectively in 2010, to 23% each this year. TheToronto Star, which had published no female op ed contributors in our previous sampling, featured 15% female experts this time.
This increase of women’s voices on op ed pages appears to be the result of a number of factors:
Our 2013 snapshot was more rigorous than the previous research, capturing three full weeks of each paper’s commentary, rather than the one to two weeks studied in 2010, and including pieces in both the print and online editions. (The limitations of the shorter 2010 sample included, for example, what turned out to be an anomalous drop in women’s commentary in the Globe. Previous research had documented the paper’s female op ed ratio ranging from 15 to 20%, well above the 8% we found.)
However, anecdotal evidence also suggests that more women are submitting commentary than ever before, and newspaper editors are more attuned to the under-representation of women on their pages than they were three years ago, and are working harder to address the imbalance.
ONLINE SPACE INCREASES PUBLICATION OPPORTUNITIES
The Globe and Mail, which has been supplementing its print pages with an online commentary hub, published almost three times (77) as many external commentators as the other papers studied (24, 25 and 29).
COLUMN DISTRIBUTION MORE EQUITABLE THAN OP EDS
Female columnists at the Toronto Star, Globe and Mail and Ottawa Citizen contributed about two-fifths of the papers’ staff commentary (40%, 39% and 37% respectively).
In contrast, the National Post sample (gathered online) featured only 20% of columns written by female writers. However, some of the Post’s regular contributors maintain regular blogs, and a few of the male writers are especially prolific in this respect, which had an impact on this ratio.
PROFESSIONAL BREAKDOWN OF CONTRIBUTORS VARIES BETWEEN PAPERS
What kinds of experts dominated the pages? Research scholars were featured most often by The Toronto Star (50%), the Globe and Mail (40%) and the Ottawa Citizen (39%), followed by think tank or NGO contributors (16%, 24% and 22% respectively). Writers and artists (broadly defined) made up the third largest category at both the Globe (9%) and the Citizen(22%), followed at those papers by journalists from other media (8% and 11%).
The National Post was again an outlier, featuring think tank or NGO contributors most often (27%), followed by media and academic writers (23% each), and political authors (11%).
INFORMED OPINIONS CONTRIBUTING TO INCREASE
Since its launch in 2010, Informed Opinions has delivered workshops to more than 480 female experts across the country, offering them insights into how to effectively translate their knowledge into short-form persuasive analysis appropriate to commentary pages and websites. The majority of our workshop participants have been university researchers, but a significant number work in the non-profit sector (including think tanks, associations and health and social service organizations).
More than 100** of our “graduates” have since published commentary in the newspapers studied, as well as in other dailies and online sites, on a wide range of issues. Most are also listed in our online Experts Network, which is designed to make it easier for journalists looking for expert women to find them.
** This number may be closer to 200; we’re only able to reliably track our grads’ commentary when they send it to us for editing feedback, and we know anecdotally that many submit and publish without soliciting the additional support we make available as part of the training we offer.