Women’s news may be available across the media, but when it comes to quotes, men are surprisingly cited more than five times as much as women.
That’s the word from a recent study which focused on women’s issues such as birth control, abortion and Planned Parenthood.
A total of 35 major publications from across the nation were used in the study, entitled “Silenced: Gender Gap in the 2012 Election Coverage”. Over 2,750 printed articles and TV segments were used in the research, which spanned the period from November 1, 2011, to May 15, 2012.
The total number of quotes was 50,754
The study was conducted by The Fourth Estate, a leg of the privately-held research company known as Global News Intelligence.
Among some of the well-known names included in the study were the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.
When the quotes dealing with women’s issues were tallied, those from men made up a staggering 81 percent of the total quotes. Women came in at a distant 12 percent while quotes from organizations accounted for the remaining 7 percent.
But according to a recent study entitled “The OpEd Project”, the problem can be tied to the author. This study shows that only 33 percent of of opinion columns on websites originated from women. The same origin for print publications and college media were 20 and 38 percent, respectively.
