Tag: data

What do three years of data on the gender gap in news reporting tell us?

Posted on by Shari Graydon

The following op ed, co-authored with Prashanth Rao and Dr. Maite Taboada, appeared on Poynter‘s website on 28 October 2021.

Looking for silver linings in the midst of a pandemic is fraught. But here’s one that journalists need to pay attention to: Since March 2020, news media have devoted a lot more time and space to covering health care, and a lot less time and space to covering hockey fights.

In the process, they’ve featured the perspectives and reflected the realities of a much wider swath of their audience. And for news organizations looking to survive, that’s a useful shift.

The gender gap in news reporting is so longstanding it should be old news. But three years of data and more than 1 million news articles from the most influential English-language news organizations in Canada have highlighted the pitfalls with hard and discouraging data.

In October 2018, we launched the Gender Gap Tracker, a digital analytics research tool that measures in real time the ratio of men and women being quoted in online news. At the time, women’s voices constituted just 27% of the total number of quotes captured. (Because the tool relies on traditional associations of names with genders, it measures gender as a binary, a limitation that denies insight into the continuum of perspectives but remains currently unavoidable, given the technology.)

Over time, however, especially with the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, we saw a recognizable uptick in the proportion of women quoted. Throughout 2021, this has been a sustained trend. On occasion, women’s voices have reached 32% (International Women’s Day, for example), but even during the recent Canadian federal election, in which the major party leaders were all male, the proportion of quotes by women continued to be around 30%.

Percentage of women sources in news stories from October 2018 through October 2021. (Courtesy: Gender Gap Tracker)

Beyond this glimmer of optimism, the Gender Gap Tracker provides useful insights into key issues of relevance to news organizations.

It’s never been a winning business strategy to chronically underrepresent 50% of your potential audience. At a time of shrinking readership and divided attention, there are clear gains to be made from featuring a greater diversity of perspectives. That became even more obvious during the pandemic, given how differently it affected women.

A related problem is what constitutes a “women’s issue.” An analysis by news topic shows that women are consistently quoted more often in so-called “soft news,” on arts and entertainment, health and lifestyle issues. In contrast, men’s voices appear much more often in articles about politics, business and sports.

Monthly gender prominence by topic of sources in news stories from October 2018 through October 2021. (Courtesy: Gender Gap Tracker research dashboard)

This reinforces both sexist stereotypes (women are caregivers; men are leaders) as well as the notion that business is more important than health care. Indeed, the ongoing tension between prioritizing unrestricted reopening of the economy over mask protocols and vaccine passports may be in part a symptom of those entrenched practices.

As the pandemic has shown, relegating to also-ran status the arenas in which women dominate (education, childcare, mental health) can have catastrophic consequences.

Analysis of who is quoted and in what role offers additional insights. Breaking down gender by profession reveals that 60% of the most quoted men and women are elected officials. This not only explains part of the gender gap, since men still dominate politics, but it also paints a more troubling picture about an over-reliance on official sources.

Elected officials often default to canned talking points or partisan interests. Journalists know this and actively seek to challenge the default in interviews. But an additional workaround would be to do a more rigorous job of supplementing government news releases with more alternative sources — including women and other underrepresented populations who are able to speak to the disparate experiences of citizens affected by the policy being proposed.

These insights reflect just a few of those available to extract from the data we amassed over the past three years. In that time, we’ve witnessed both the US 2020 presidential election and two federal elections in Canada. We’ve seen topics change with the seasons and major world events unfold, told through the words of those being quoted.

What has not changed substantially is the gender gap in media reporting. Beyond the obvious need for more equity, leaving that gap unaddressed is a missed opportunity for news organizations.

Prashanth Rao is an applied scientist with a passion for building AI systems with a social impact. Maite Taboada is a computational linguist researching social and traditional media. Shari Graydon is the founder and catalyst of Informed Opinions, an organization dedicated to amplifying women and gender-diverse people’s voices. 

In numbers there is strength – how big data can help close the gender gap in Canadian journalism

Posted on by Shari Graydon

This article was originally published in The Ottawa Citizen

We hear a lot these days about how artificial intelligence is taking away jobs and making it easy for foreign powers to hack democracy. But some scientists are hunched over their computers in an effort to harness the power of big data analytics for social good.

A new tool just launched by Informed Opinions is a case in point. We collaborated with a team of researchers at Simon Fraser University’s big data lab to develop a sophisticated digital monitoring system. It’s now measuring, in real time, the gender ratio of sources being quoted online by some of Canada’s most influential news outlets. It analyzes in microseconds what it used to take researchers hours to assess.

If only the data it reveals were more encouraging.

How grim are the statistics? Type gendergaptracker.informedopinions.org into your browser and see for yourself. You can access data as far back as October 2018, but no matter which date range you select, the aggregate percentage of women’s voices never moves above 26 per cent. For context, that’s a mere four-point increase over data we collected almost three decades ago.

And yet, in the intervening years, women have achieved significant advancement in virtually every field. They’ve become premiers and astronauts, Supreme Court justices and university presidents, corporate CEOs and award-winning scientists and entrepreneurs. And while it’s true that more men still lead governments and corporations, our research has found that even in health care disciplines, where women dominate, their voices remain under-represented.

That’s a problem. Women’s life experiences are often profoundly different from men’s. Those experiences feed different insights and sometimes priorities. So it’s not remotely defensible in a proud democracy that men’s perspectives continue to outnumber women’s by a ratio of almost three-to-one in public discourse. We can – and need to – do better.

Informed Opinions last commissioned content analysis research looking at the gender ratio of quoted and featured experts in 2015. Canada’s prime minister had just sworn in a new gender-balanced cabinet, and we were edging towards the #MeToo revelations that would remind everyone of the social consequences of failing to listen to women’s perspectives.

The aggregate ratio of experts quoted in the 2015 study was 29 per cent women to 71 per cent men. But that analysis left out both sports and entertainment coverage. It also included two broadcast talk shows: CBC Radio’s The Current, and Radio Canada’s Tout le monde en parle. Both programs exceeded 40 per cent female interviewees, raising the average stats overall.

In fact, the better performance of public broadcasters on gender parity planted the seed for the Gender Gap Tracker. Because Radio Canada and CBC are explicitly mandated to reflect the country to itself, their reporters and producers pay more attention to diversity. What gets measured does, indeed, get done. Anecdotal evidence and common sense suggest that journalists who actively track the gender of their sources achieve more equitable results. And a growing number are reporting on their performance.

The mixed gender team of scientists developing the Gender Gap Tracker includes researchers from across disciplines. They hail from Canada, Iran, Brazil and Spain and they’ve worked in the U.S., the U.K. and Switzerland. A microcosm of Canada’s diversity, they tangibly demonstrate the payoffs of collective intelligence that benefits from different perspectives.

We’ve set 2025 as the target date for achieving gender parity in Canadian news media. The Gender Gap Tracker, though, is just a tool. To make a difference, journalists need to actively seek to improve the data – and news consumers need to give them reasons to do so.

Online tool gives media outlets incentive to achieve gender parity

Posted on by Shari Graydon

This article was originally published in The Toronto Star

Could the incentivizing power of a fitness tracker be adapted to help achieve gender equality in the media, enhancing Canadian democracy in the process? After a year of collaboration with a team of big data scientists, we’re about to find out.

Despite the increasing attention paid to the importance of women’s voices, in news media coverage — both in Canada and around the world — male perspectives continue to dominate by a ratio of more than two or three to one. In the days when few women earned graduate degrees, led organizations or were elected to public office, that dominance was understandable. But today? Not so much.

The disparity in representation now makes headlines. In 2012, the BBC convened an all – male panel to discuss breast cancer and teen contraception. The outrage was as swift as it was predictable. But humiliation can sometimes be a galvanizing force: Britain’s national broadcaster has since offered hundreds of expert women free media interview skills training. And last year, it explicitly committed to meeting a 50:50 challenge, aiming to ensure the equitable representation of male and female sources by 2020. Some programs have already achieved the milestone two years ahead of schedule.

In fact, doing so isn’t that difficult. Matthieu Dugal, host of Radio Canada’s La Sphere, reported more than two years ago that his program had featured as many female guests as male — despite its focus on technology. Similarly, Bloomberg has been actively seeking gender balance among its business news sources for several years.

Going beyond established contacts to achieve such diversity takes effort. In addition to searching for new sources, journalists have to actively record and tally their metrics. Several journalists at The Atlantic have written about their own commitment to doing this, and science reporter Ed Yong estimates that achieving gender parity requires an extra hour a week. He calls his monitoring spreadsheet “a vaccination against self delusion.”

In an age of the perpetual news cycle, when many reporters, editors and producers are doing the job of three people, we understand why this might be unappealing. But there are upsides to the vaccination discipline.

La Sphere’s gender parity achievement was accompanied by an increase in the program’s audience share. And The Financial Times recently discovered that reframing one of its electronic newsletters to actively engage female readers inspired higher open rates in male readers as well.

Given social media’s disruption of news gathering revenue models and the need to sustain trust among news consumers, all news organizations should be paying attention to these experiments. Indeed, a collaboration between the World Economic Forum and Internews, a U.S.-based global non-profit, is explicitly aimed at ensuring more women’s voices are included in news coverage, in pursuit of increasing community trust in news.

That’s why Informed Opinions has been working with researchers at Simon Fraser University to put big data to work in the service of democracy. Over the past year, we’ve built the Gender Gap Tracker, an online digital tool that monitors the ratio of male to female sources quoted in Canada’s most influential news media. It features easy-to-read graphs updated on a daily basis reflecting both the performance of individual newsrooms, and the aggregate ratio of them all.

The tool captures only the sources cited on each news outlet’s website; it’s unable to quantify those who might appear in broadcast interviews, but aren’t referenced online. Yet so far, its results mirror the ratios found in previous research done manually. The goal of the Gender Gap Tracker is to celebrate news organizations that lead by example, and motivate those who lag behind. And it offers news consumers and media organizations alike a daily reminder of the remaining gap.

Improving this metric is important for all of us. Good journalism is fundamental to democracy, and the persistent underrepresentation of women’s perspectives denies Canada access to the analysis and ideas of many of its best and brightest. It also undermines policy decisions. Many issues affect women differently; solving complex social, economic and environmental problems requires us to more equitably integrate their experiences and insights.

Diverse, qualified women exist in virtually every field, and for the past nine years, Informed Opinions has been motivating and delivering media skills training to thousands of them across the country. Our free online database of diverse experts committed to responding to interview requests quickly now features more than 800 female sources.

We’re looking for Canadians to join us in reminding journalists that it’s no longer necessary (or defensible) to declare, “But I couldn’t find a qualified woman.”