The Media Has a Woman Problem

[Commentary] A new report by the Women’s Media Center found that male reporters still accounted for 63 percent of bylines in the nation’s top 10 papers and about the same proportion of newsroom staff. All but one of the individual winners of Pulitzer Prizes in journalism this year were male.

Men’s dominance in the field tends to be highest in prestige or “hard” topics like politics, crime, business, technology and world affairs; women put up better numbers in “soft” subjects like education, lifestyle, culture and health. Male opinion columnists outnumber women by more than two to one at The Wall Street Journal, more than three to one at The Washington Post, and five to one at The New York Times. As for sports -- do you need to ask? Men also represent authority and expertise in more subtle ways. On the front page of The New York Times, the study noted, men were quoted three times more often than women. When women were writing the stories, the number of women quoted went up.

What the report doesn’t answer is why this disparity persists, and why women are more equal in some sectors of journalism than in others. As journalism expands beyond institutional newsrooms, deals are more easily made out of sight. The same is true in science, where women are far less likely than men to be invited to join lucrative corporate scientific advisory boards. Doors can open. But new kinds of doors can be closed.

[Mundy is a program director at the New America Foundation]