Idea Lab Noteworthy
Moshe Reuveni
The Science Byline Counting Project found that 81 percent of features in Scientific American are written by men.
Mind the Gap: Gender Imbalance in Science Journalism by N’dea Yancey-Bragg
Where are the women? That is the question a team of volunteers sought to answer when they began the Science Byline Counting Project last year. A small team of counters tracked 11 major publications over eight months to see just how many women were writing for the most popular forums in science journalism.
While there is certainly room for improvement, the data revealed a surprising level of gender equity. In total, female authors wrote 855 articles while male authors wrote 867. Women’s bylines outnumbered men’s in six of the publications studied. Among the other five, the largest disparities were in The Atlantic and Wired, where men wrote 71.4 percent and 63.6 percent of pieces respectively. Disparities emerged more clearly when the articles were categorized by length or topic. In all but two
8 | Solutions | May-June 2016 | www.thesolutionsjournal.org
publications, women wrote the most short (less than 500 words) pieces. However, in longer works and feature stories, the gap was either slim or stark. In six of the publications there was near-perfect gender balance, while in the other five, men accounted for at least 70 percent of the pieces. Harper’s Magazine, for example, had a 50/50 ratio, while men wrote 81 percent of the features in Scientific American. When organized by category, female authors contribute more or almost equally compared to their