@article{2025:andrich:do_women_w,
title = {Do Women Write More About Women? The Impact of Journalist Gender on the Media Visibility of Female and Male Politicians},
year = {2025},
note = {The representation of women in politics and political journalism
remains disproportionately low. This paper argues that these
disparities are interconnected, as individual journalists exhibit a
same-gender preference when deciding who to cover. Since journalists
are key gatekeepers in the selection and dissemination of news,
gender-based differences in reporting can contribute to the limited
media visibility of female politicians. Drawing on more than 500,000
news articles, this study investigates how the gender of journalists
(n = 2,315) influences coverage of female and male politicians (n =
1,087) across 17 U.S. news outlets from 2010 to 2020. Using several
metrics of media visibility and Bayesian multilevel models, we
estimate the effects of journalist gender while accounting for
unobserved characteristics of articles, individual reporters, media
outlets, and temporal context. The results indicate that journalist
gender is a small but consistent factor in shaping gendered media
visibility. Articles by female journalists were more likely to include
at least one female politician, mention them more frequently, and
feature them more prominently. However, these differences varied
significantly across media outlets, suggesting that individual
journalistic decisions are shaped by organizational context.
Longitudinal analyses show that the observed gender bias has remained
stable over time. By highlighting the impact of journalist gender on
political news coverage, this study shows that inequalities in
newsrooms may contribute to imbalances in media content.},
journal = {M&K Medien & Kommunikationswissenschaft},
pages = {386--403},
author = {Andrich, Aliya and Bachl, Marko and Domahidi, Emese},
volume = {73},
number = {3}
}