Data from: Women are seen more than heard in online newspapers

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.