Unnamed Women: New Study Reveals Men Dominate Media Articles By More Than 250%

The media in 2023 continue to underrepresent and mistreat women.

‘Pedro Sánchez’s wife denounces the host of an interview program’ was the headline in several newspapers in Spain on March 1. The story was about Begoña Gómez, Sánchez’s wife, denouncing the television presenter, Pilar Baselga, for spreading a hate campaign against her. Gomez’s name was painstakingly absent from many of the headlines, and instead she was relegated to the role of ‘wife’ despite the fact that she was co-directing a master’s course at Madrid’s Compultense University.

For a woman, who is the center of a news story, to have her name invisible is an example of a type of bias that continues to be commonplace within the media. A new study looks at the current state of affairs on how women are portrayed in the media, and the findings are grim.

The report, nameless womenconducted by the Spanish global communication firm Llorrente & Cuenca (LLYC), studied 12 countries (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Mexico, Panama, Peru, Portugal, Spain, and the United States) and a total of 14 million articles published in the last year to measure the presence of women in the news.

The study reveals that there is 250% more news about men than about women and the latter occupy 21% less in the headlines. Also, when women appear in articles, their gender and family are often explicitly mentioned. The sectors in which the gap is most evident are the economy, politics, technology and sports.

Some key research findings expose how headlines centered around women often focus more on their gender and use their name as secondary information. While this may seem like a mere case of semantics, it reveals a bias that makes women invisible and anonymous.

The study found nine key areas to focus on to improve the visibility of women in the media as accelerators of equality:

1. Women are underrepresented: Despite improvements in media coverage of women, 2.5 times as many stories were published about men than about women in the last year.

2. Women Are Anonymized: Women’s names appear 21% fewer in headlines than their male counterparts. In sectors such as sports, science, leadership and cinema, the discrepancy is even greater, at 40%. An example would be; ‘A woman could be the new president of the United States’ instead of ‘Kamala Harris is a strong candidate for president of the United States.’

3. Gender approach: the explicit mention of gender is 2.3 times more frequent in the case of women than in that of men. This places women in an anecdotal and inferior role.

4. Men have more firms than women: men hold 50% more firms than women. The sections where women have more signatures, around 45% of the total, are those of culture, events, health and society, while men dominate the topics of economy, politics, technology and sport.

5. Women are tied to their families: The news is obsessed with women’s families. Stories about women have 36% more explicit mention of their family, relegating them to the archaic notion that their main role in society is to be a wife or mother. The numbers become surprisingly more polarizing when 366% more stories about women-led businesses mention their family compared to those run by men.

6. The important thing is the appearance: more emphasis is placed on fashion and image for women than for men. 1 in 25 news items focus on the appearance of women, 20% more than that of men.

7. The victims are the protagonists and not the aggressors: women are mentioned three times more than men when talking about gender violence and twice more in situations of harassment. In violence-related headlines, the term woman is 20% more likely to be mentioned than the term ‘man’. The names of the victims are also exposed more often than the name of the offender, which is often hidden by an alias.

8. Sport is still a male playground: only 5% of sports articles mention women. Soccer in particular is perceived as 95% male.

9. Women Should Be Superwomen: The media is obsessed with the all-powerful woman, an exceptional success story and role model. News about female politicians focuses 50% more on their successes and downplays their mistakes compared to male leaders. The problem? It aggravates impostor syndrome for those women who plan to have more exposure.

LLYC’s extensive research exposes the entrenched gender bias that continues to exist in the media. As the gap closes, the finer details become more relevant and the language used to describe women comes to the fore.