Chart of the Day: Women write about family and gender, men cover literally everything else

When we talk about gender imbalance in the media, it’s not just about women being generally underrepresented compared to men–it’s also about what topics they’re covering. Are women’s voices present in the media conversations around the full range of important issue areas of the day, or are they still siloed into certain traditionally feminine spheres? Welp, take a look at today’s depressing chart brought to you by Foreign Policy using data from The Op-Ed Project:

chart of who writes on different topics in newspapers and magazines by gender

I’m actually surprised that gender split when it comes to family and gender issues isn’t even more skewed toward women. I guess our tendency to more readily turn to men as experts on everything under the sun nearly outweighs our assumption that things like gender and family are just touchy-feely “women’s issues” unworthy of serious exploration by “objective” male minds. Perhaps this is a sign that we’re coming around to the idea that men also have genders and, usually, families too?

Maybe that’ll feel a little more like progress once women make up more than 15 percent of bylines on topics like the economy and global politics. I hear those are pretty important issues too. But what do I know? I spend most of my time writing about gender.

(h/t @JustinWolfers)

Maya DusenberyMaya Dusenbery is an Executive Director of Feministing.

St. Paul, MN

Maya Dusenbery is executive director in charge of editorial at Feministing. She is the author of the forthcoming book Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick (HarperOne, March 2018). She has been a fellow at Mother Jones magazine and a columnist at Pacific Standard magazine. Her work has appeared in publications like Cosmopolitan.com, TheAtlantic.com, Bitch Magazine, as well as the anthology The Feminist Utopia Project. Before become a full-time journalist, she worked at the National Institute for Reproductive Health. A Minnesota native, she received her B.A. from Carleton College in 2008. After living in Brooklyn, Oakland, and Atlanta, she is currently based in the Twin Cities.

Maya Dusenbery is an executive director of Feministing and author of the forthcoming book Doing Harm on sexism in medicine.

Read more about Maya

Join the Conversation