Two high-profile roles previously held by women — Diane Sawyer of ABC News and Jill Abramson of The New York Times—were changed in 2014,” said Julie Burton, presi-dent of the Women’s Media Center. “These veteran jour-nalists were in positions of power at media giants, shaping, directing and delivering news. Both women were replaced by men.’

Political coverage has an enormous impact on elections — which are the main or only time this country has a national dia-logue about its direction — and women should have an equal ability to ask questions and shape coverage,” center co-found-er Gloria Steinem wrote The Associated Press in an email.

“’Online musings’ is a ridiculous euphemism for what are of-ten grossly violent and misogynistic threats,” Soraya Chem-aly, director of the Speech Project of the Women’s Media Center, which seeks to encourage free expression and curtail online abuse, told Cosmopolitan.com. “It sends the message to abusive partners, obsessive stalkers, or angry rejected boys that it’s just fine to post a little ditty in social media and claim they were joking. It sends the correlating message to women that their realistic assessments of risk and the costs of chang-ing their lives in response to threats is irrelevant. It solves nothing and, arguably, makes things worse.

Though many websites subsist in legal gray zones, some large sites have taken it upon themselves to self-censor user posts, according to Soraya Chemaly, the executive director of the Women’s Media Center Speech Projectand a women’s rights advocate. She pointed to changes Facebook has made, such as choosing to take down pages with names like “12 Year Old Slut Memes”—which featured photos of young girls with explicit and crude captions—as well as Reddit’s removal of its creepshot subreddit as prog-ress. (It’s worth nothing that a subreddit that claims to be a critique of fashion hosts content that is at least a little similar to the stuff on the old creepshot page.)

Name It, Change It” campaign backed by the Women’s Media Center in New York found that calling out and chal-lenging sexist language makes a difference. The campaign has a stated goal of ending “sexist and misogynistic cover-age of women candidates.

Lauren Wolfe, who covers sexual violence in conflict zones for Women Under Siege and sat on the Commit-tee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) for five years, says that the question of how covering trauma affects journalists was rare-ly brought up during her time there. “It’s a conversation that no one is willing to have,” she says.

This is truly the most frightening, upsetting story I’ve seen come out of there, and this is a place with a lot of truly up-setting stories.” Lauren Wolfe, director of WMC Women Under Siege Project

Another volunteered the Women’s Media Center’s She-Source, which describes itself as “an online braintrust of fe-male experts on diverse topics designed to serve journalists, producers and bookers who need female guests and sources.

Just last year, the Women’s Media Center published Unspin-ning The Spin, a massive tome of unbiased language that can be used by reporters, government officials, and just about anyone who wants to provide a balanced look at the facts.

State authorities are also accused of taking rural women from their homes and abusing them, targeting indigenous women and community workers. In one report, said Women Under Siege, a mother recounted testimony of “criminals” who “forced my daughter out of her house with support of civilian and military authorities and ... tortured, raped and decapitated her.”

A recent study by the Women’s Media Center found that women have scored only 19 percent of all non-acting nomi-nations over the past 10 years

Women were credited with only 36.1% of total bylines or on-camera appearances as anchors or reporters, according to a 2014 study by the Women’s Media Center (WMC), de-spite the large enrollment numbers in journalism colleges.

Sometimes women are killed after they’re raped, so we don’t find about them,” said Lauren Wolfe, director of the Women Under Siege project at the Women’s Media Cen-tre in New York. “Then you have the chaos of war, and you have people moving around, and on top of that you have the stigma that prevents women from coming forward.” Ms. Wolfe has been tracking sexualized violence in Syria for three years, listening to the stories of women in Jordanian refugee camps. The problem is “definitely underreported,” she said in a phone interview. It’s not just an issue of women being silenced by shame or stigma, but by official disregard and a lack of resources. “It comes down to a lack of money — you have to have the aid workers and support systems in place.

The Women’s Media Center, which was founded by Jane Fonda, Robin Morgan and Gloria Steinem and tracks gen-der equity, or lack thereof, in the media, found that in non-acting categories, women made up under 20 percent of the nominees. In seven categories — directing, writing, original screenplay and more — dudes drew all of the nominations. The one place where women are establishing a foothold is in documentary features, with women winning four times in the last decade and nabbing two of five nominations this year.

“One of the things we try to do at the Women’s Media Center is to model what an alternative media would look like, not just criticize.” — Robin Morgan