Dare To Be A Feminist

Twitter has come under fire from mainstream journalists and institutional gatekeepers, derided as "toxic" and a "poisonous well." But this opposition to Twitter—to its strengths as a democratizing platform—is as old as media itself.

In this post I present the most comprehensive analysis ever reported of the gender of New York Times writers (I think), with a sample of almost 30,000 articles.

This subject has been in the news, with a good piece the other day by Liza Mundy — in the New York Times — who wrote on the media’s Woman Problem, prompted by the latest report from the Women’s Media Center. The WMC checked newspapers’ female byline representation from the last quarter of 2013, and found levels ranging from a low of 31% female at the NYT to a high of 46% at the Chicago Sun-Times. That’s a broad study that covers a lot of other media, and worth reading. But we can go deeper on the NYTimes, thanks to the awesome data collecting powers of my colleague Neal Caren.

Here are the results based on 21,440 articles published online from October 23, 2013 to February 25, 2014.

If boys won’t read books with girl protagonists, the solution is not to create more explicitly “boy” books, the solution is to delve deeply into “why,” says Soraya Chemaly. Last week, The Independent announced it would no longer review books that were specifically marketed to either boys or girls. As they put it, “Gender-specific books demean all …

Net neutrality explained. Will you have to pay more for Netflix, or a fee to be able to stream YouTube videos at full speed?

"Despite years of progress for women in science, men continue to dominate scientific publishing in nearly every country, according to new research in the journal Nature.

Not only do men publish far more research than their female colleagues, but papers with men as the dominant author are more likely to be cited by other researchers."

"Literary girls don't take road-trips to find themselves; they take trips to find men."

I came of age without a literary soulmate. Growing up, I read every book recommended to me. Nick Carraway's lucid account of the 1920's seduced me. Huck Finn's journey up the river showed me the close link between maturity and youth, and Ray Bradbury taught me to be wary of big government as well as the burning temperature of paper. While the male characters of literature built countries, waged wars, and traveled while smoking plenty of illicit substances, the women were utterly boring.

"Journalism is changing, and so is the role of women in the workplace. But the two are not always evolving in harmony. Women substantially outnumber men in journalism training and enter the profession in (slightly) greater numbers, but still only a relative few rise to senior jobs. The pay gap between male and female journalists remains stubbornly wide, and older women - especially if they have taken a career break - find it difficult to retain a place in the industry.

Women in journalism still cluster around particular subject genres. Historically, they were almost totally confined to “pink ghettos”, but as more women entered the industry, there was an expectation that their opportunities would expand and that they would duly embrace areas that had been traditionally male, like hard news, crime or politics.

But a byline analysis of UK national newspapers in 2012 indicates that some areas still have very few women, in particular politics, sport and opinion writing. These findings are also supported by qualitative interview data. There are similar lacunae in the US press."