This isn’t just another report – it’s the largest study to date on persistent gender bias in Australian newsrooms.
Led by WLIA Fellow Professor Andrea Carson, this report analyses over 200,000 articles using cutting-edge machine-learning techniques to examine women’s voices in Australian news – both as news story creators and as expert sources.
The results?
While some progress has been made, there is a long shadow of gender bias. Women are still sidelined to less-visible pages, given fewer words, and disproportionately assigned to ‘soft news’ topics like entertainment and lifestyle. Meanwhile, men dominate coverage in high-impact areas such as politics, economics and foreign affairs.
The gap extends beyond just who’s writing the stories. On the other side of media coverage – the quoted experts, the people who are bestowed with authority in the media – the same old story persists. As in past reports, men dominate the quotes, and they tend to quote other men more often. Women are better at quoting their fellow women.
