Steinem took part in a roundtable discussion on Women’s Media Center’s weekly radio show WMC Live with Robin Morgan. When asked about comments decrying Abramson as “difficult” or “brusque,” Steinem was quick to point out that male editors of the Times were even more demanding than Abramson. “It’s obvious that it’s a double standard, a huge, huge double stan-dard,” Steinem, who is also a co-founder of the WMC, said. “I mean, we have all known editors of newspapers, and especially The New York Times, I’m thinking of Abe Rosenthal, who was so difficult that he was legendary. So, there’s clearly a double standard.

Speaking on the weekly radio show from the Women’s Media Cen-ter that she co-founded, Steinem calls Abramson’s firing a “huge double standard,” pointing to difficult male editors at The Times.

The number of female bylines, and at the helm, is similarly small. And the worst offender among newspapers is the Grey Lady, ac-cording to the Women’s Media Center’s “Status of Women in U.S. Media” report released in February. The study pointed out that while some major barriers were broken by the likes of Abramson, there was a long way to go

The Women’s Media Center in its most recent report noted that men still dominate the top editing spots in my industry, snag the most bylines, are quoted the most and dominate radio and TV as talking heads. Last year, the report found that the New York Times had the fewest female bylines among the nation’s 10 larg-est newspapers at 31 percent, compared to the Chicago Sun-Times’ 46 percent, the Wall Street Journal’s 43 percent and the Washington Post’s 41 percent. That, and moving more women into leadership, Abramson said she was committed to change.

As the Times’ public editor noted in a column published just two days before Abramson’s firing, the Times has the lowest represen-tation of women on its pages among the 10 top newspapers. According to a recent study from the Women’s Media Center, with 69 percent of its bylines coming from men.

A study released earlier this year by the Women’s Media Center found that 31% of stories in the New York Times are written by women, the lowest percentage among the nation’s top 10 most widely circulated newspapers. The Chicago Sun-Times led the way at 46%; the Los Angeles Times fell in the middle at 36%. The study quoted Abramson saying she was working to close the gap.

She also emphasized Abramson’s hiring of Margaret Sullivan, the paper’s public editor and the first woman in that position, as a noteworthy accolade. Just this week, Sullivan brought up issues of gender imbalance at the Times. Her column reported results from a Women’s Media Center study that said among the top 10 most widely circulated papers, the Times had the biggest gender gap, “with 69 percent of bylines going to men.

The Women’s Media Center found that men still dominate the media industry, from bylines to leadership positions to editorial page writers to guests on the Sunday news shows.The stats help explain why there was such a visceral reaction to Abramson’s fall and Nougayrede’s departure Wednesday among many women in the field.

In a Monday New York Times column by Margaret Sullivan, the paper’s public editor, extensively quoted from a Women’s Media Center study that noted the gender gap that persists in the byline count and number of opinion writers, for example, at the country’s 10 most widely circulated newspapers, which would include The Times

Some facts, according to a recent Women’s Media Center study: At the nation’s 10 most widely circulated newspapers, men had 63 percent of the bylines, nearly two for every one for a woman. (The study looked at bylines only in the first section of the papers.) Among those papers, The Times had the biggest gender gap — with 69 percent of bylines going to men...Back in the office last week, I chatted with Janet Elder, a deputy man-aging editor, about the Women’s Media Center report, what the numbers mean and how much things have changed for women in journalism.