Gender gaps within the New York Times newsroom
The New York Times is one of the United States’ oldest newspaper institutions, one that is highly regarded as quality, professional journalism. Therefore, we also hold it to high standards when it comes to closing diversity gaps that have existed in journalism since the beginning of its existence. For my project, I sought to research gender gaps in the journalism field by going through each of the major sections of the New York Times and tallying up the number of articles written by male and female journalists between April 22nd and April 29th to see if there are any notable disparities between genders. It should be noted that only written articles were counted, meaning pieces such as video stories, podcasts, and letters are not included in the final results.
The first set of results compiled are of the first five major sections of the New York Times. This includes U.S., World, Business, Arts, and Lifestyle news. There was a larger gap between female and male journalists in both the U.S. and World sections, with the number of articles written by men significantly higher than women. The Business section also had more male writers than female writers, although the gap isn’t as prominent as the first two. Finally, the Arts and Lifestyle sections are more female-dominated, with Lifestyle seeing a wider gap than Art
The second set of results looks at a few subsections within the larger, major sections. These include U.S. Politics, Opinion, and Pop Culture articles. U.S. Politics had a wide gap between genders just as the major U.S. news section did, with male journalists largely outnumbering female journalists in the same section. Pop Culture and Science were pretty close to even. Health was the only section that had more female journalists than male journalists. The Sports section only had one article written by a female journalist, and it should be noted that the particular article was centered around all-girl sports team playing in a league for boys.
In the second chart, Opinion articles had the second widest gender gap of all of the subsections chosen for this research. I suspect that this has much to do with the fact that of the current listed Columnists for the New York Times, eleven are male while seven are female. The pie chart above shows the percentage of male versus female journalists, with is 61.1%—38.9%. This disparity likely reflects why more Opinion articles are written by male journalists than female journalists.
The results of this study is indicative of the New York Times’ still present gap between male and female journalists. Although there are still many wonderful female journalists who work for the Times and have their work frequently showcased on the front page, there still seems to be unevenness throughout the different sections and subsections of the paper. For instance, of the major sections, U.S., World, and Business has more male writers, while Arts and Lifestyle are female-led. I believe this could reflect a wider societal belief that Arts and Lifestyle type stories are “for women,” while more serious and “important” stories such as the ones in the U.S. and World news are “for men.” This can also be applied to the Health subsection, which also had more articles written by female journalists as opposed to male journalists.
The research done here is supported by a study done by the Pew Research Center in 2023 found that “men are far more likely than women to cover certain beats — especially sports — while journalists who are women are more likely than men to cover news about social issues, education and health.” They also found that male journalists “account for majorities of those who cover political news (60%) and news about science and technology (58%).” Pew also found that the gender split of journalists is close to evenly split, with men at 51% and women making up 46%.
Many industries are working to combat the gender gaps within their organizations, and the New York Times has made valiant strides over the past 100 years. There is still work to be done, though, and this can be helped by being conscious of giving equal opportunities when hiring journalists. There is also a wider issue at play, here, which is that ingrained patriarchal gender divides still exist, meaning more women by default are likely to apply to cover more “feminine” beats such as Arts and Lifestyle, so we as a society should work to encourage women to apply for other, male-dominated journalism beats.
Journalism is an important branch of democracy, an outlet that can amplify voices that otherwise might not be able to be heard within their communities. To ensure that no community is being overshadowed by another, it’s important to ensure that our newsrooms are staffed equally with diversity in mind. The New York Times is designed to both inform and entertain, and it has already done work to add women and people of color to its newsrooms, which can be seen within the stories that it covers. However, the research above shows that there is still much work to be done in closing the gender gap specifically, and hopefully the Times will take this research into account in the future.
References
Tomasik, E. (2023, April 4). U.S. journalists’ beats vary widely by gender and other factors. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/04/04/us-journalists-beats-vary-widely-by-gender-and-other-factors/