There’s much more consciousness how the media impacts our lives. There’s more activism. There’s more young girls convinc-ing magazines not to photoshop their fashion photographs and distort women’s bodies. “There’s much more consciousness but there’s not nearly enough actual change of who’s on and what topics are covered. But we’ll get there.” — Gloria Steinem

Still, Wu says she’s more bothered that young women might steer clear of gaming development than by the intimidation she is experiencing. Women represent 47 percent of gamers but only about 12 percent of game developers, according to a 2014 report by the Women’s Media Center

“The Women`s Media Center, yearly, comes out with this, which is the Status of Women in the U.S. Media and people can get it for free at WomensMediaCenter.com and just download it. And there`s everything you didn`t want to know that was hap-pening or not happening and everything you did. There`s very little praise in here, I want you to know. But there is this sentence, ‘our researchers pointed out one example of good stuff. MSNBC commentator Chris Hayes, who sees the merits in setting race and gender quotas for the media — Hayes’ bookers must in-clude two women among the four guests on each of his shows.’ “So congratulations — and you may frame that!” — Robin Morgan

Julie Burton, president of the Women’s Media Center, an orga-nization devoted to monitoring the images of women and their impact on culture, told me: “Television has great cultural and economic power. It tells us who we are and what our roles are in society.” Burton says she is excited by some of the recent de-pictions of women as leaders and candidates, but they are still “the exception.” She concluded, “If the standard TV image of a politician is a man, women—and importantly, girls—won’t see themselves in that picture and won’t aspire to those positions. That’s a loss for everyone.”

We can turn to the news for balance, but who’s telling the story there? Last year, the Women’s Media Center counted newspa-per bylines, TV anchors and found an imbalance, 63 percent men, 36 percent women

Last summer, Lauren Wolfe, the director of Women Under Siege, a project at the Women’s Media Center, visited the Zaatari ref-ugee camp on the Jordan-Syria border. There, she met a young woman with a baby who said her husband, out of work and angry, had started beating her every day.

“This is the third year I’ve done a gender count of the Emmy nom-inees, and overall, the ratios haven’t changed much,” Rachel Lar-ris, WMC’s communications manager, told BuzzFeed. “Looking at all the names in all the categories, women made up only 26% of the nominees this year and it was the same last year.”

“It’s always good to see more women’s voices in media, particu-larly as owners, leaders and sources,” said Julie Burton, president of the Women’s Media Center (WMC). “The [WMC] hopes that as the Sarah Palin Channel develops its online network team that it will be cognizant of women’s representation behind the scenes and in front of the camera, particularly in light of recent Radio Television Digital News Association (RTNDA) and American So-ciety of News Editors (ASNE) studies showing some gains for women and people of color, yet still widespread disparity.”

In this year’s nominations, only 26 percent were women, accord-ing to an analysis by Rachel Larris of Women’s Media Center. This number isn’t improving either. In 2013, the ratio for Emmy nominations was about the same

Women are the predominant victims of rape and sexual assault; therefore, they may have some insight on the editing of a col-umn on sexual assault. A study by the Women’s Media Center showed that women staffers at newspapers are outnumbered.

Lauren Wolfe, director of the journalism project Women Under Siege, which has documented decades of wartime rape, says little has changed over the years because of prejudice against rape vic-tims based upon culture and religion. “Most victims cannot expect support or to see a prosecution. The most likely outcome would be stigma, even within families,” Wolfe said.

“It is a problem in almost every war — whether the conflict is based on ethnicity or religion, it’s always there for one reason or another,” said Lauren Wolfe, director of Women Under Siege, a journalism project at the Women’s Media Center on sexualized violence in conflict, and an advisory committee member for the International Campaign to Stop Rape & Gender Violence in Conflict. “In Syria, rape is present because it is an effective tool. It is culturally so pow-erful, an easy way to make a statement ... to humiliate your enemy in a culture where the purity of women is so sanctified.”

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