Five out of every six names in the media today are men’s, report researchers. In fact, the more the media mention someone, the higher the chances are that the person is a man.
The researchers combed through data from more than 2,000 US newspapers, magazines, and online news sources from 1983-2009 to arrive at this conclusion.
Despite significant social and economic advances in many fields, there remains a persistent underrepresentation of women in media coverage, something that the researchers call a “paper ceiling.”
The ‘Paper Ceiling’
“The persistent gap in media coverage is due to a combination of the media’s preoccupation with leaders at the expense of everyone else and the well-known ‘glass ceiling’ that continues to block off working women’s access to leadership positions,” says Eran Shor, an associate professor in the sociology department at McGill University and the lead author of the study in the American Sociological Review.
“The media focuses nearly exclusively on individuals at the top of occupational and social hierarchies, who are mostly men: CEOs, politicians, movie directors, and the like,” Shor says. “And because these famous individuals account for most of those named in the news, there continues to be a big gap between the mentions of men and women in the overall media coverage.”
Shor and his coauthors were surprised to discover that women’s presence was no greater in news produced by liberal American media organizations than in that produced by conservative ones. Nor did they find that women’s presence in the media increased in organizations where women were editors-in-chief or managing editors or where there were more women on the editorial boards.
