Media coverage of women in science
Media coverage can give scientists a powerful career boost but a new study finds that benefit goes disproportionately to men, potentially widening existing gender gaps, Indian independent science journalist Anirban Mukhopadhyay writes in research publication Science. This finding is in line with a recent study by the Global Media Monitoring project showing that while women make up half of the global population, only 26% of those who are seen or heard in the news are women.
This has barely changed in the last 15 years, with a nine-point change in 30 years, according to the study produced by the international communication rights organization WACC and supported by UN Women.
Anirban Mukhopadhyay reports that an analysis of 1.2 million news stories about scholarly research shows that men-led papers receive more attention overall and were heavily overrepresented in the top 5% of most covered studies.
“Women-led papers, on the other hand, clustered at the bottom.”
Chaoqun Ni of the University of Wisconsin–Madison and colleagues found that only about one in eight of the papers—which spanned STEM, social sciences, and the humanities—received any media attention at all. Their findings are in a paper published in Science Communication in August.
“Of the 129,000 studies that did garner coverage, men-led papers were on average highlighted in more outlets than women-led ones.”
“A paradox also emerged across fields in terms of whether a study was covered at all. In male-dominated areas such as economics and business, women-led work was slightly more likely to be covered than expected. But in fields nearer gender parity—public health and social sciences—women-led papers were less likely to make the news.”
17% of international patents are held by women while men have 83%, according to UN data.
With the trends today, gender parity in international patenting will take until 2061, the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) says.
Women inventors were included in only 23% of all international applications between 1999 and 2020, while men were involved in 96%, according to WIPO’s report The Global Gender Gap in Innovation and Creativity.
Biotechnology, pharmaceuticals and food chemistry had the highest rates of women inventors while far fewer women inventors were noted for mechanical engineering.
The WACC study says that North American news media are closest to gender parity, at four out of 10 subjects and sources being women.
Asian and Middle Eastern media are at the end, with just 19% women of the persons seen, heard or spoken about in the news in both regions.
“Women’s comparative presence in the core topics of politics and the economy rose 2 points and 1 point respectively between 2020 and 2025, 6 points in science and health stories – a “correction” of the 2020 Covid era status when women had been displaced from prominence in this topic.”
Various forms of gender-based violence (GBV) offline and online are featured in less than two out of every 100 news articles worldwide.
“The gender gap in online news reporting widened in three regions – Africa (4-point decline), Latin America (-5 points) and the Middle East (-6 points).”
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