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

Abstract

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.