Women’s representation in media: the best data on the subject to date
From the post:
In the first of a series of datablog posts looking at women in the media, we present one year of every article published by the Guardian, Telegraph and Daily Mail, with each article tagged by section, gender, and social media popularity.
(images omitted)
The Guardian datablog has joined forces with J. Nathan Matias of the MIT media lab and data scientist Lynn Cherny to collect what is to our knowledge, the most comprehensive, high resolution dataset available on news content by gender and audience interest.
The dataset covers from July 2011 to June 2012. The post describes the data collection and some rough counts by gender, etc. More analysis to follow.
The data should not be impacted by:
Opinion sections can shape a society’s opinions and therefore are an important measure of women’s voices in society.
It isn’t clear how those claims go together.
Anything being possible the statement that “…opinion sections can shape a society’s opinions…,” is trivially true.
But even if true (an unwarranted assumption), how does that lead to it being “…an important measure of women’s voices in society[?]”
Could be true and have nothing to do with measuring “…women’s voices in society.”
Could be false and have nothing to do with measuring “…women’s voices in society.”
As well as the other possibilities.
Just because we can count something, doesn’t imbue it with relevance for something else that is harder to evaluate.
Women’s voices in society are important. Let’s not demean them by grabbing the first thing we can count as their measure.