Still a Boy’s Club: Women Journalists & Political News Coverage

ABSTRACT

We investigate the level of gender parity in political news reporting at the New York Times. We apply a media sociology approach to examine how gender stereotypes, women in media leadership, and women in political leadership interact to affect the extent to which women journalists appear in bylines about domestic and foreign affairs news. We leverage an original data collection of nearly 3,000 news articles published from 2007–2020. We find several key results. First, women are more likely to appear in bylines about domestic political news than foreign affairs news. Second, we find that during Jill Abramson’s tenure as executive editor the number of women writing about politics increased. Third, as the proportion of women in the U.S. Congress rises, more women appear in story bylines about political news. Fourth, while more women write about political news now compared to the past, most political news stories still have men as authors. Our findings show slow but steady improvement in the gender diversity of political news journalists.

KEYWORDS:

• Women journalists
• politics
• New York Times
• gender stereotypes
• gatekeeping
• media sociology
• foreign affairs

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the LSU Gender & Politics Research Lab for assisting with the data collection. We are also grateful to the editors and anonymous reviewers at Journalism Studies and Emily Rains who provided moral support at a critical time in this paper’s development.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 https://www.nytco.com/company/diversity-and-inclusion/

2 It would be ideal to create variables based on the total proportion of journalists on staff at the NYT, but we are unable to find accurate data.

3 Pelosi’s second tenure as Speaker ended at the end of 2022, but our data stop at 2020.

4 Our data end in 2020 before Harris officially became Vice President. She is included in our data on women in Congress. We’d expect Harris’s presence as VP to affect gendered patterns of political news writing post-2020.

5 We also include regression analyses included in Appendix 2, Table A5.

6 https://www.poynter.org/business-work/2017/women-dominate-journalism-schools-but-newsrooms-are-still-a-different-story/

7 https://www.fordfoundation.org/media/5489/grej-gender-media-report-102519.pdf

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by a Louisiana Board of Regents Research Competitiveness Subprogram Grant (Grant #: LEQSF(2020-23)-RD-A-34) and the Remal Das and Lachmi Devi Bhatia Memorial Professorship.