IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/plo/pone00/0148434.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Women Are Seen More than Heard in Online Newspapers

Author

Listed:
  • Sen Jia
  • Thomas Lansdall-Welfare
  • Saatviga Sudhahar
  • Cynthia Carter
  • Nello Cristianini

Abstract

Feminist news media researchers have long contended that masculine news values shape journalists’ quotidian decisions about what is newsworthy. As a result, it is argued, topics and issues traditionally regarded as primarily of interest and relevance to women are routinely marginalised in the news, while men’s views and voices are given privileged space. When women do show up in the news, it is often as “eye candy,” thus reinforcing women’s value as sources of visual pleasure rather than residing in the content of their views. To date, evidence to support such claims has tended to be based on small-scale, manual analyses of news content. In this article, we report on findings from our large-scale, data-driven study of gender representation in online English language news media. We analysed both words and images so as to give a broader picture of how gender is represented in online news. The corpus of news content examined consists of 2,353,652 articles collected over a period of six months from more than 950 different news outlets. From this initial dataset, we extracted 2,171,239 references to named persons and 1,376,824 images resolving the gender of names and faces using automated computational methods. We found that males were represented more often than females in both images and text, but in proportions that changed across topics, news outlets and mode. Moreover, the proportion of females was consistently higher in images than in text, for virtually all topics and news outlets; women were more likely to be represented visually than they were mentioned as a news actor or source. Our large-scale, data-driven analysis offers important empirical evidence of macroscopic patterns in news content concerning the way men and women are represented.

Suggested Citation

  • Sen Jia & Thomas Lansdall-Welfare & Saatviga Sudhahar & Cynthia Carter & Nello Cristianini, 2016. "Women Are Seen More than Heard in Online Newspapers," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 11(2), pages 1-11, February.
    • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0148434
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0148434
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0148434
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0148434&type=printable
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1371/journal.pone.0148434?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Unknown, 2014. "Media Coverage 2014," 2014: Ethics, Efficiency and Food Security: Feeding the 9 Billion, Well, 26-28 August 2014 225573, Crawford Fund.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Shuoyu Fang & Li Zou, 2023. "Narratives of Women and Gender Relations in Chinese COVID-19 Frontline Reports in 2020," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 20(5), pages 1-17, February.
    2. Martha Chinomnso Okafor & Luke Ifeanyi Anorue & Paul Martin Obayi & Onyebuchi Alexander Chima, 2023. "Knowledge and Attitude Toward Media Campaigns Against Gender-Based Violence Among Nigerian Women in Southeast, Nigeria," SAGE Open, , vol. 13(4), pages 21582440231, October.
    3. Hanne Vandenberghe, 2019. "Representation of Women in the News: Balancing between Career and Family Life," Media and Communication, Cogitatio Press, vol. 7(1), pages 4-12.
    4. Dima Kagan & Thomas Chesney & Michael Fire, 2020. "Using data science to understand the film industry’s gender gap," Palgrave Communications, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 6(1), pages 1-16, December.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Getz, Donald & Page, Stephen J., 2016. "Progress and prospects for event tourism research," Tourism Management, Elsevier, vol. 52(C), pages 593-631.
    2. Oliver Wagner & Thomas Adisorn & Lena Tholen & Dagmar Kiyar, 2020. "Surviving the Energy Transition: Development of a Proposal for Evaluating Sustainable Business Models for Incumbents in Germany’s Electricity Market," Energies, MDPI, vol. 13(3), pages 1-17, February.
    3. Garthwaite, K.A. & Collins, P.J. & Bambra, C., 2015. "Food for thought: An ethnographic study of negotiating ill health and food insecurity in a UK foodbank," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 132(C), pages 38-44.
    4. Mohammad Reyaz, 2020. "Cyberspace in the Post-Soviet States: Assessing the Role of New Media in Central Asia," Jadavpur Journal of International Relations, , vol. 24(1), pages 7-27, June.
    5. Saad, Mohsen & Samet, Anis, 2020. "Collectivism and commonality in liquidity," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 116(C), pages 137-162.
    6. Koon-Magnin, Sarah, 2015. "Perceptions of and support for sex offender policies: Testing Levenson, Brannon, Fortney, and Baker’s findings," Journal of Criminal Justice, Elsevier, vol. 43(1), pages 80-88.
    7. Pantea Kamrani & Isabelle Dorsch & Wolfgang G. Stock, 2021. "Do researchers know what the h-index is? And how do they estimate its importance?," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 126(7), pages 5489-5508, July.
    8. Afful-Dadzie, Eric & Afful-Dadzie, Anthony, 2017. "Liberation of public data: Exploring central themes in open government data and freedom of information research," International Journal of Information Management, Elsevier, vol. 37(6), pages 664-672.
    9. Jeffrey Cohen & Yuan Ding & Cédric Lesage & Hervé Stolowy, 2017. "Media Bias and the Persistence of the Expectation Gap: An Analysis of Press Articles on Corporate Fraud," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 144(3), pages 637-659, September.
    10. Hu, Gang & Jo, Koren M. & Wang, Yi Alex & Xie, Jing, 2018. "Institutional trading and Abel Noser data," Journal of Corporate Finance, Elsevier, vol. 52(C), pages 143-167.
    11. Diana Tsoy & Danijela Godinic & Qingyan Tong & Bojan Obrenovic & Akmal Khudaykulov & Konstantin Kurpayanidi, 2022. "Impact of Social Media, Extended Parallel Process Model (EPPM) on the Intention to Stay at Home during the COVID-19 Pandemic," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 14(12), pages 1-32, June.
    12. Oehler, Andreas & Schmitz, Jonas Tobias, 2021. "Does intensified communication of hedge funds with letters affect abnormal returns?," International Review of Economics & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 76(C), pages 127-142.
    13. Yang, Xiaoping & Cao, Dongmei & Andrikopoulos, Panagiotis & Yang, Zonghan & Bass, Tina, 2020. "Online social networks, media supervision and investment efficiency: An empirical examination of Chinese listed firms," Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Elsevier, vol. 154(C).
    14. Yang Song, 2020. "The Mismatch Between Mutual Fund Scale and Skill," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 75(5), pages 2555-2589, October.
    15. Bai, John (Jianqiu) & Ma, Linlin & Mullally, Kevin A. & Solomon, David H., 2019. "What a difference a (birth) month makes: The relative age effect and fund manager performance," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 132(1), pages 200-221.
    16. Chen, Yangyang & Goyal, Abhinav & Veeraraghavan, Madhu & Zolotoy, Leon, 2020. "Terrorist attacks, investor sentiment, and the pricing of initial public offerings," Journal of Corporate Finance, Elsevier, vol. 65(C).
    17. Elena Kulchina, 2016. "A path to value creation for foreign entrepreneurs," Strategic Management Journal, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 37(7), pages 1240-1262, July.
    18. Seong Choul Hong, 2020. "Presumed Effects of “Fake News” on the Global Warming Discussion in a Cross-Cultural Context," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 12(5), pages 1-11, March.
    19. Robert M. Bushman & Christopher D. Williams & Regina Wittenberg‐Moerman, 2017. "The Informational Role of the Media in Private Lending," Journal of Accounting Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 55(1), pages 115-152, March.
    20. Diego Téllez & Maximiliano González & Alexander Guzmán & María Andrea Trujillo, 2017. "What do you say and how do you say it: Information disclosure in Latin American firms," Documentos de Trabajo CIEF 16358, Universidad EAFIT.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0148434. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: plosone (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.