November 18, 2021 | Media

The Status of Women in the U.S. Media 2021

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"The Status of Women in the U.S. Media 2021” is comprised of 109 studies and reports, including original research by the Women’s Media Center and aggregated research from academia, industry and professional groups, labor unions, media watchdogs, newsrooms, and other sources.

These are among its key findings about traditional print, TV, and online journalism:

At 117 of the nation’s roughly 200 newsrooms affiliated with the Institute for Nonprofit News, 28% of staffers were of color and 69% were women.
Women made up 44.7% of the local TV news workforce in 2019, fractionally down from the previous year’s record high of 44.9%. The tally of White people in local TV fell to 73.4% from 74.1% during the same period, according to the Radio Television Digital News Association (RTDNA).
In local radio news, women accounted for 39.9% of the workforce, down from 44.4% in 2018. The tally of White people fell to 84.6% from 85.5% during the same period, according to RTDNA.
Among the top 100 personalities on radio news talk shows, the number of women rose to only 12 in 2020 from 10 in 2019, according to Talkers.
Of the top 100 personalities of sports talk shows on the radio, not one was a woman, according to Talkers.
Women were 50% of podcast listeners, but men hosted 79% of the top podcasts, according to The Wrap.
Racial diversity was the No. 1 priority of 42% of newsroom leaders responding to a nationwide newsroom survey, following unrest over George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer; gender diversity was the No. 1 priority for 18% of them, according to Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.
At 41 Gannett-owned newspapers, women earned up to $27,000 less annually than men, according to the NewsGuild.
The Los Angeles Times, in a $3 million court settlement, agreed to retroactively pay and adjust salaries of Black, Latinx, and women employees who earned less than White men. Women earned 70 cents for every $1 that men earned.
At Reuters, where the top 10 wage-earners were men, Black and Latinx employees were paid an average of $10,083 less than their White counterparts, and women earned an average of $2,020 — or 1.6% — less, according to the NewsGuild.
At The Washington Post, the average yearly salary for women aged 40 and older was $126,000, while men of the same age earned an average of $127,765, more than 1.5% more than women. Women younger than 40, had average annual earnings of $84,030, 14% less than the $95,890 men their age earned, according to the Washington-Baltimore News Guild.
79% of 115 surveyed women journalists in the United States said online harassment affected press freedom and, some added, fear of online abuse made them avoid reporting on certain kinds of stories, according to the Seattle University Department of Communication.
U.S. newsroom employment fell 23% between 2008 and 2019, according to Pew Research Center.
Advertising dollars declined 42% and subscription revenue by 8% at 300 newspapers during COVID-19,
according to Pew.
Women comprised 61.6% of bachelor’s-degree, 65.3% of master’s-degree, and 58.4% of doctoral- degree candidates in journalism and mass communication, and the overall proportion of female mass communications and journalism undergrad and grad students dropped, according to Texas Tech University College of Media & Communication.
In 120 nations, from 1995 to 2020, the number of female news sources and subjects increased from 16% to 24% in newspapers, 15% to 24% in radio news, 21% to 26% in TV news, and 25% to 27% online, according to the Global Media Monitoring Project.
Women comprised 5% of experts in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) who were mentioned and a third of persons quoted in 146,867 articles about COVID-19 that were published by 15 leading news organizations worldwide, including CNBC, CNN, Fox, The New York Times, and USA Today.
Whites, who comprised 34.2% of the city’s population, were 58.7% of people featured in Philadelphia Inquirer news articles written by full-time staffers. Whites were 61.3% of featured persons in published stories by staffers, freelancers and the wire services, combined, according to Temple University Klein College of Media and Communication.
Twenty-three of 37 murdered transgender or transsexual persons nationwide were misidentified in at least 139 news articles, according to Media Matters.
Amid a surge in anti-Asian violence, during COVID-19, two of the four network Sunday morning news shows did not feature Asian American guests during the segment addressing a mass shooting of Asian women and others in Atlanta, according to Media Matters.
Women accounted for 32% and persons of color 27% of 1,671 guest appearances on the top five cable and traditional broadcast TV Sunday news talk shows, according to the WMC.
Models of color were on the covers of 48.8% of major magazines in 2020, reflecting a roughly 12 percentage-point increase over 2019, according to Fashion Spot.
Of 751 journalists surveyed on how they chose sources of news and commentary, 58% said they were satisfied with the level of diversity among their sources; 72% said their news organizations could improve its strategic efforts at ensuring diversity, according to Expert Source and the Associated Press.
Those aged 18 through 34 drove a surge in TV news consumption in 2020 that was linked to the country’s reckonings with a deadly pandemic, police slayings, and a presidential election, according to Pew.
More than any other race, Blacks trusted local news and the media’s watchdog efforts, according to Pew.
57% of 9,654 surveyed U.S. adults said news organizations did a good or excellent job covering
demonstrations protesting the Minneapolis police murder of George Floyd, according to Pew.
Telemundo and Univision, now owned by Whites, owned most of the largest U.S. news outlets targeting Latinx audiences, according to City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism.
Most of the smallest Latinx-focused outlets — 244 newspapers and 32 magazines — were independently owned with small or no newsrooms at all.
Women owned 5.3% of the nation’s 1,368 full-power commercial TV stations, a 7.3% decrease from 2015, according to the FCC.
People of color owned 1.9 % of the nation’s 1,368 full-powered commercial TV stations, down from 2.6% in 2015, according to the FCC.

These were some major findings in entertainment TV and film:

29% of protagonists in the top 100 films of 2020 were women, representing an 11 percentage-point decrease from 2019, according to the Center for the Study of Women in Television & Film.
Black females constituted 6.5% of the U.S. population but 3.7% of leads or co-leads in the 100 top- grossing films of the decade ending in 2019, according to the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media.
Setting record highs, 32 of the top 100 films of 2019 had women of color as lead characters and 17 top films had women of color as co-lead characters, according to the University of Southern California Annenberg Inclusion Initiative.
No women aged 50 years and older were lead characters in the top 10 money-making films in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, and France in 2019, according to the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in the Media.
Female-led family films almost doubled over the decade ending in 2017, and, for the first time, in 2016, annual profits on female-led films exceeded revenue on male-led films, according to the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in the Media.
A record 8% of family films featured a lead with a disability in 2019, according to the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in the Media.
Across the 100 top-grossing movies from 2007 through 2018, 4.5% of a total of 47,268 characters were Latinx; 3% of films featured Latinx actors as leads; 49% of those lead or co-lead roles — or 17 — went to women, according to the USC Inclusion Initiative and National Association of Latino Independent Producers.
In 2018, films in which actors of color comprised 21% to 30% of the cast had the highest median global box office receipts and were released in the most international markets. In 2018 and 2019, films whose casts mainly were comprised of White actors had the lowest receipts worldwide, according to the UCLA College of Science.
Women received 4.8% — or 70 — of 1,448 directing jobs on the top 1,300 movie releases of 2007 through 2019, according to the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative.
Of 2020’s 100 films with the highest box office receipts,16% were directed by women, a historic high, according to the Center for the Study of Women in Television & Film.
Hollywood writers who were women and persons of color each held 5% more jobs in 2019-20 television than they did in the 2018-19 season. In movies, women writers held 4% more jobs and writers of color 2% more jobs in 2019, according to Writers Guild of America West.
The percentage of female film critics in 2020 inched up to 35% from 34% in 2019, according to the Center for the Study of Women in Television & Film.
Of 205 non-acting nominees for the 2021 Oscars’ non-acting categories, 65 — or 32% — were women, according to the WMC.
People of color were 19% of 230 executives, division heads, and other senior leaders at Walt Disney Company, AT&T Inc.’s WarnerMedia, Comcast Corp.’s NBCUniversal, ViacomCBS, Sony Pictures and Netflix, according to the Los Angeles Times.
For the first time, during the 2018-19 season, women and persons of color directed more than half of all entertainment TV episodes, according to the Directors Guild of America.
Men continued to dominate the non-acting Prime-time Emmy Award nominations in 2021, receiving 65% of those preliminary honors, slightly less than 2020’s 68%, according to the WMC.
27.3% — a record high — of broadcast TV shows had casts comprised mainly of people of color in 2018-19, up from 2% in 2011-12, according to the UCLA College of Science.
Of 773 characters appearing regularly on traditional broadcast prime-time television shows in 2020-21, 9.1% — or 70 — were lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer. That was a decrease from the previous year’s record high of 10.2%, according to GLAAD.
While women were 52% of the nation’s population, they garnered 37.9% of screen time for the top 10 recurring characters in shows across all broadcast, cable, and subscription-based services, according to Nielsen.
63% of broadcast, cable, and streaming shows, from September 2019 to September 2020, employed five or fewer women; 16% employed five or fewer men, according to the Center for the Study of Women in Television & Film.
37% of crime series writers were women and 11% were women of color; the underrepresentation is responsible for “advancing distorted representations of crime, justice, race, and gender,” according to Color of Change.
For first time, in 2019, new U.S.–produced live-action TV series with diverse casts outnumbered non- diverse casts, with 71 in the former category and 69 in the latter, according to Parrot Analytics and Creative Artists Agency.
Though women accounted for roughly 47% of Super Bowl watchers, men in Super Bowl ads had 71% of speaking parts, 65% of screen time, and 64.2% of prominent characters, according to the Geena Davis Institute and Google.

These were some of the findings about Broadway theater and recording studios:

Twice as many Whites — who got 61.5% of all roles — worked as actors on Broadway and Off Broadway than were in the overall population of New York City, according to the Asian American Performers Action Coalition.
Women were 20.2% of Billboard’s top artists and 28% of Grammy nominees, according to the University of Southern California Annenberg Inclusion Initiative.
Songs by female artists accounted for an average of 10% of the top 150 country songs on Billboard’s year-end radio airplay chart and for 10% of the top 20 songs played weekly on air, according to Country Music Television.
Of artists performing 500 of the top country songs of 2014 through 2018, an average of 16% were women, according to the USC Annenberg Inclusion Institute.

These were some major findings about gaming, STEM and publishing fields and other media-related issues:

The top female gamer, competing in tournaments, earned 7% of what the top man earned, according to Casino.org.
Women, persons with disabilities, Blacks, Latinos, Native Americans, and Native Alaskans were underrepresented in science and engineering, including sectors that feed the pipeline to certain jobs
in technology, gaming, software development, social media, and other media, according to the National Science Foundation.
At Twitter, in 2021, women accounted for 43.7% and men for 55.1% of the global workforce.
Of Google’s U.S. workforce, 32% were female, according to its 2021 diversity report.
Women accounted for 41% and men 59% of the nation’s 214.4 million video-game players, according to the Entertainment Software Association.
Of 7,893 staffers surveyed at book publishing companies, book review journals, and literary agencies, 74% were women, 23% were men, and 76% were White, according to Lee & Low.
Whites accounted for 95% of authors of 7,124 books published between 1950 and 2018 by five major U.S.-based publishers, according to The New York Times.
The top 25% of 1,000 large companies, globally, with the most gender-diverse C-suites outperformed those in the bottom quartile by 25%, according to McKinsey & Co.
After implicit bias against Asian Americans steadily declined for more than a dozen years, there was, on March 8, 2020, a 650% increase in Twitter retweets of “Chinese virus,” former President Donald Trump’s reference to COVID-19, according to Health Education & Behavior.

Download The Status of Women in the U.S. Media 2021

Read past year's reports:

The Status of Women in the U.S. Media 2019

The Status of Women in the U.S. Media 2017

The Status of Women of Color in the U.S. News Media 2018

The Status of Women in the U.S. Media 2015

The Status of Women in the U.S. Media 2014

The Status of Women in the U.S. Media 2013

The Status of Women in the U.S. Media 2012

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