Julie Burton, president of the Women’s Media Center, explains the impact of women, on average, writing only a third of stories at major newspapers. “Media tells us our roles in society — it tells us who we are and what we can be,” Ms. Burton said in an introduction to the report. “This new report tells us who matters and what is important to media — and it is not women.”

The Women’s Media Center just released its annual re-port — and it breaks down a wealth of scary yet import-ant statistics on how women in journalism are represented across media platforms compared to their male colleagues. The numbers cast a bleak shadow on the future of journal-ism for aspiring newswomen

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.

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.’

“Our research shows that women, who are more than half of the population, write only a third of the stories. Media tells us our roles in society — it tells us who we are and what we can be. This new report shows us who matters and what is important to media — and clearly, as of right now, it is not women,” center president Julie Burton said in a statement.

Julie Burton, president of WMC, broke down their find-ings in the report’s introduction: Women, who are more than half the population, are assigned to report stories at a substantially lower rate than men. In evening broadcast news, women are on-camera 32 percent of the time; in print news, women report 37 percent of the stories; on the Inter-net, women write 42 percent of the news; and on the wires, women garner only 38 percent of the bylines.

“’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