We Collected Data On the Gender Balance of New York Times Bylines. Here's What It Revealed.

The New York Times building. Photo credit: Michal Osmenda [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

When Ellen Pao, founder of Project Include, a consulting group dedicated to diversity in male-dominated spaces, alerted us to the gender imbalance in the New York Times front page bylines, we decided to take a closer look and have been diligently tracking the numbers since October 2019. While it is true that front page stories are often dictated by the top news which tend to be covered by journalists in male dominated beats, these stories are now regularly authored by multiple journalists, providing plenty of opportunity to demonstrate reporting staff diversity. Isabel Wu, our amazing summer intern, dug into the numbers and has written about what she found.

Why count the Times? Because “who controls the past, controls the future.”

The New York Times publishes hundreds of articles a day and provides news to people around the world. According to Pew Research Center, the Times is one of the top 25 most-trafficked news sources in the United States, and it is a place where most journalists and writers would be honoured to be featured. The New York Times’ importance to our national conversation makes the perspectives it chooses to highlight significant. In the words of George Orwell’s 1984, “Who controls the past, controls the future.” While not controlling the past in the same way that Big Brother’s authoritarian regime does, the New York Times does play a large role in shaping perceptions of recent world events and is an important domino in a long chain of recording and reproduction of the news.

It’s this large role the New York Times plays on the world stage that made the gender imbalance of their bylines an important count for GenderAvenger once Pao’s own attention to it on Twitter made us aware of the issue. She has called the Times out repeatedly for their significant lack of women on the front page.

With inspiration from Ellen Pao, we started collecting data.

We joined Pao in her efforts to record representation in the New York Times, and we have been collecting data on the Sunday edition front page for the past six months. In line with Pao’s callout, the October 2019 Times’ front page had 80% men; however, throughout the months that we tracked, October 2019 to June 2020, the proportions of men, women, and women of color on the front page fluctuated. By the beginning of 2020, the balance of men dropped to 51% with women and women of color steadily gaining representation from October to January. From January to April 2020, the share of men’s bylines increased again to its zenith of 62% before dropping off in May and June 2020, which had a low of 51% men’s bylines. The breakdown of bylines per month can be seen below:

A clearer story emerges once the data is placed in context.

While the aggregated data presents a mixed view of women’s representation, a clearer story emerges once one examines the timing of different current events. The proportion of men’s bylines hits a low in January before climbing up again. Between the end of February and the beginning of March, the New York Times front page had an influx of pandemic-related articles with large cover stories that had a majority of men in the bylines. Along with pandemic-related news, there was an increase in political coverage, marked by the Democratic primaries, which began on February 3rd. This trend is not exclusive to the New York Times. In fact, according to the Women's Media Center, among the top 14 most read newspapers, men received 66% of byline credits while women received only 34% in international and political news.

At the beginning of May, the proportion of men’s bylines decreased dramatically, with women and women of color taking their place throughout July. This change came in the wake of George Floyd’s tragic killing on May 25th and the surge of Black Lives Matter protests that followed shortly after. Thus, it was encouraging for us to see that out of 25 women on the front pages, 12 of them were women of color, which was a much higher percentage than in previous months. The New York Times’ and other major news outlets’ elevation of the voices of Black men and women in this cultural context was the correct and necessary thing to do.

We need more women and women of color to provide much-needed perspective on the New York Times.

Thanks to Ellen Pao, we have taken a much closer look at the New York Times’ commitment to gender representation, and through the data, we see a mixed story. The newspaper did a good job of elevating the voices of women and women of color in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement; however, this sort of representation is a coin with two sides. It is critical that white men do not write the story on a movement focused on the systemic racism Black lives face in the justice system, but we also need to see women and women of color’s voices elevated in all other sectors of the news so they can provide a much-needed perspective on politics, technology, and international news. For that reason, the New York Times still has a ways to go.