Whose voices are heard? The byline gender gap on Argentine news sites

Abstract

This article examines patterns of gender discrimination in the authorship of news stories in general, and opinion pieces in particular. Drawing on feminist media scholarship, content analysis of 3013 articles from eight Argentine news sites and their respective social media accounts during 2017 shows that 32.63 percent of the stories with bylines were authored by women; stories about sports, politics, and crime were less likely to have a female byline; there were no significant differences across news sites; and this gap was smaller on the Facebook and Twitter accounts of the news outlets examined than on their home pages. In the case of opinion pieces, the percentage with female bylines dropped to 15 percent, which amounts to a significant difference with other genres even after controlling for other variables, such as topic or news site. On the basis of these findings, we reflect on how factors such as news topics, the format of the news article, and the type of digital source interact with gender as a structuring mechanism of media representations.