Getting Women Into the News

Women and men read The Post in roughly equal proportions, but female readers don't read it as frequently and the paper is failing to draw women with younger children. Readers who follow women's sports or their daughters' teams complain that women's sports don't get the ink they deserve.

The Post, like most of the news media, is dominated by coverage of men from the A section to Business and Sports. Over the years, researchers at Northwestern University and the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism have found that in the news media, men are the focus of many more stories, are quoted far more often and appear in more photos than women do. A recent study of two weeks' worth of content at The Post reached a similar conclusion.

That is partly because the world's newsmakers -- whether sports figures, religious leaders, military officers, public officials or criminals -- tend to be men. So women do not see themselves portrayed as fully in The Post.

"Male dominance of news inevitably reflects men's greater likelihood of holding positions of authority, yet women seem absent from political news in disproportionate share to their positions of power," according to an overview of the subject done for a November 2007 seminar on Women and the News at Harvard University's Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. A study of the news media by Pew's Project for Excellence in Journalism in 2005 found that 88 percent of the stories quoted at least one man, compared with 41 percent quoting a woman; women were quoted more than 50 percent of the time only in lifestyle stories. Newspapers tend to be better about using female sources than other media.

For years, studies by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press have shown that while men and women have equal interest in the news, women almost always score lower than men on basic current-events questions, no matter what their education, age and work status. But women are just as knowledgeable as men on issues that are of particular interest to them, such as education and health care. (Men can name the secretary of state, and women the local school superintendent.)

Post readership research mirrors that, showing that men and women are equally interested in breaking and national news, but that women are more interested in local news, especially about schools, and in health, food and home topics.

A group of women in the Post newsroom studied the issue this year and urged top male editors to pay more attention to issues that draw women, to look for female experts to be quoted, for female leaders to be featured and for women to be in photos as much as men.

Several studies conclude that women are far more likely than men to make spending decisions related to the home, something that should interest advertisers, and that they plan to a greater degree than men, making the Weekend section or online listings of greater relevance.

Plus, as I've urged before, women's opinions must be featured more often on the op-ed page, which is still overwhelmingly male.

Another way to draw all readers is for stories and information to be presented in a way that shows what importance they might have to readers. Too many Post stories are presented from an institutional point of view.

Opportunities abound, especially on Page 1, to draw in women with stories about families, relationships and parenting. The Post in print has precious little coverage of those topics outside of Style advice columnists. Washingtonpost.com has a blog, On Parenting, and women gravitate to the Web site's Smart Living page. Women also care about consumer issues, which can get short shrift.

Getting more women into news pages may be easier than getting them into sports pages, which, like the rest of The Post, have a dwindling amount of space for stories. The sports pages' readership is dominated by men, and local women and their coaches frequently complain that women's sports and top female athletes don't get high-profile coverage, whether for high school, college or pro teams.