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Gender in Media: Related Work
GenderMeme is not the first project to look at gender in media. In this section, we survey the other work in this space.
Duration: July 2007 - present, run by Katie Orenstein
In a nutshell: The Op-Ed Project aims to 'increase the range of voices and quality of ideas we hear in the world'. It works specifically to get more women writers into Op-Ed pages, by conducting workshops designed to encourage women to write Op-Eds and hone their work, although it may have grown beyond this specific function, to work in general to encourage women thought-leaders. Also, it conducts periodic byline surveys; however, I could only locate a report released in 2012, published here and here (the two versions are almost the same), which analyzed articles in ten media outlets over twelve weeks in 2011. I also found a smaller article here on bylines in 2011.
Key findings in byline report: Women write more Op-Eds in New Media than Legacy media (and the most in College Media), and the percentage of women writing Op-Eds has been increasing from 2005 till 2012. However, women tend to be more concentrated in 'Pink Topics' (the four F's: food, family, furniture, fashion; women-focused subject matter; gender/women's issues; and profiles of women in which gender is a significant issue).
Duration: January 2011 - present, started by Jasmine Linabary and Jan Bacon.
In a nutshell: This project's goal is to "monitor gender in internet news". Notably, it conducted a "gender check", which was a study of how frequently women appeared as sources and authors in online news. One lead article from each of eight selected websites was chosen and manually examined every week, and information on its sources, author's gender, and category was compiled. The results from 2011 are here. The gender check project ran for four months of 2012, before being discontinued. The Gender Report also found the percentage of women in select newsrooms. Starting in June 2012, they also began to conduct their own byline survey to generate weekly byline reports. These reports were published for six months. They have also published a few reports, like this and this, on gender diversity in newsrooms.
Key findings: The usual lack of balance in bylines, sources and newsrooms. This note on the challenges of studying gender-representations in online media is especially worth reading.
Duration: Analyzed news relating to the 2012 election through many lenses, including gender. Mostly active through 2012.
In a nutshell: The 4th Estate's goal was to analyze the media to understand various metrics, such as "how often women are quoted versus men; reliable quantitative data that serves as the basis for making arguments of liberal or conservative bias", etc. Notably, they analyzed the 2012 election. In particular, their gender-related election coverage is here. Their election analysis got a lot of media attention, compiled here. Their methodology seems quite interesting, and it is something we could replicate/extend, for the 2016 election, if we have the data. Also, in this interview, they stated a goal similar to our Gender Thermometer (although they did not intend to restrict this to gender alone): "We are examining trends, measuring changes, and bringing these observations to the public’s attention with visual representations. Our goal is to build a widely accessible tool that is performing real time parsing of news coverage across many domains, so people will be able to monitor and analyze on a continuous basis those topics that are of interest to them." It is unclear whether this was accomplished (since they service private clients, it could have been done outside of the public eye -- but from the complete lack of information, I would hazard a guess that this goal was not achieved). The 4th Estate seems to have gone cold after its period of activity in 2012, and in 2014 its parent company was acquired.
Key findings: In the US election 2012 coverage, men were more likely to write the news (across practically every vertical). The study also examined quotes in popular TV and print media, and found men were more likely to be quoted as experts, even on so-called women's issues.
Duration: Funded with a $30000 grant from the Knight Foundation from 11/30/12 - 5/31/13.
In a nutshell: The Open Gender Tracking Project built a service that takes in an article in json format and returns some gender-based metrics of the article (gender of writer, and male/female mentions). The repositories for the project are here; the contributors to the repository seem to have been Irene Ros, Nate Matias and Jeremy Merrill (from NYT). The goal was to "create a deployable service that newsrooms and content providers could use to evaluate the gender split of both writers and voices in stories", so as to raise awareness of gender in the media. Case studies were done on the Global Voices archive (written about here), and on Boston Globe's data (couldn't find a write-up).
Points to note: Not too different in concept from GenderMeme, except we are aiming to compute more metrics than them. They seem to have a better gender detector for international names than us. Also, it seems that the project is mostly inactive now (why?).
Duration: 2013 - present.
In a nutshell:
Key findings: