Women as Contributors
Women working full-time in daily newspapers total about 15,200 or 36.62 percent of the staff. Minority women accounted for 16.3 percent of female newsroom staffers. Both percentages have declined about one percent point since 2008. [The American Society of News Editors, 2010]
Recent research revealed that 85 percent of the articles on collaborative online encyclopedia Wikipedia has are written by men. The Wikimedia Foundation is making an effort to encourage more women contributors to the site and has set a target of 25 per cent female contributors by 2015.
Sources for News
Women are persistently underrepresented as experts and authorities: 81% of experts and 82% of spokespersons who appear in the news are male. [Global Media Monitoring Project, 2009]
Out of 16,800 news stories from 45 different American news outlets—broadcast, print and Web—more than 75% of news stories included male sources and only 30 percent included even a single female source. Only in lifestyle stories do women show up in more than 50 percent of the stories. [The Global Media Monitoring Project, 2010]
Women as a Focus
Only 24% of news subjects – the people interviewed, or whom the news is about—were found to be female in 7,000 news stories and 14,000 news sources in 42 countries. (Global Media Monitoring Project, 2010)
Only 16% of all stories focus specifically on women. (Global Media Monitoring Project, 2010)
Women Who Lead in Communication/ Media
Women make up less than 13% of board members in America. 2% of Fortune 500 companies are run by women and 5% of companies listed on the UK’s FTSE index are run by women. (The White House Project 2010) (The Glasshammer, 2010)
