I chose to track USA Today (it is, after all, “The Nation's Newspaper”) over seven days. During those seven days I found a great disparity in the number of times that men were mentioned compared to women.
On the front page, I found that, over seven days, men were mentioned 83 times while women were named only 21 times. On day six, no women were mentioned on the front page and on day seven there was only one female named.
Men were mentioned 89 times while women were mentioned 15 times on the front of the Business section. On day five, no women were named.
On the Sports section's front page, I found the widest difference. Women were mentioned only 11 times compared to the 113 men named. No women at all were mentioned on the Sports section's front page on day two of my tracking.
Mentions of women and men were the closest in number in the Arts/Life section of the USA Today. During my seven days of tracking, men were named 48 times and women 36.
Race was mentioned directly only once, in a story about Japan's jobless situation. I did count a couple of other names that were asian (including the Dali Lama), a couple that were clearly middle eastern and one hispanic name but, again, these were only inferred by me. They weren't directly labeled by their race. I also noticed that it seemed that most african americans mentioned were on the sports page.
Titles were mentioned quite often. I took note of everything that identified the person in question. There were, by my count, 13 mentions of President Obama and an additional 38 uses of governmental, judicial or military titles. There were 37 C-suite titles mentioned. I found 29 “professional” titles (these include lawyers, doctors, architects, consultants, directors, presidents and vice-presidents). There were 21 academic titles mentioned (only 3 of which were science or math-related titles.) There were also three religious job titles and five law enforcement job titles mentioned (I expected more but there were few crime stories on the USA Today front page.) I noticed only four blue collar job titles listed. There were also 78 mentions of titles or job identifiers for sports or entertainment figures.
It seems that despite the fact that there are approximately an equal number of men and women writing for USA Today, there is a huge disparity in the number of men and women that are the subjects or sources for their stories. It seems that government officials and c-suite professionals are used as sources many more times than are “common” folks. I also noticed an absence of the mention of race. I'm not sure if that means that race is becoming less of an issue or if it's actually more of an issue because reporters are afraid to mention it.
