New Reuters Institute factsheet sheds light on women and leadership in the news media

Less than a quarter of the top editors across major online and offline news outlets are women, according to a new study from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

The Institute’s new factsheet analyses the gender breakdown of top editors in a strategic sample of 240 major online and offline news outlets in 12 different markets, across five continents.

Of those, it revealed that only 21% of the 179 top editors across the 240 brands covered are women.

And it comes despite the fact that, on average, 40% of journalists in the 12 markets are women – last year the top-line figure was 22% across the same markets.

The data was collected in February 2022 and the 12 markets included in the sample were Kenya and South Africa in Africa; Hong Kong, Japan, and South Korea in Asia; Finland, Germany, Spain, and the UK in Europe; Mexico and the US in North America; and Brazil in South America.

In each market, they focused on the top ten offline and online news brands in terms of weekly usage, as measured in the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2021.

Other key findings include:

• Among the 51 new top editors appointed across the brands covered, 23% are women. In some countries (Spain, the UK, and the US), half or more of new top editors appointed in the last year are women, but in many others few or none are.
• In 11 out of 12 markets, the majority of top editors are men, including in countries where women outnumber men among working journalists.
• The percentage of women in top editorial positions varies significantly from market to market–from 7% in Brazil to 50% in the US.
• In 11 out of 12 markets, there are considerably more women working as journalists than there are women among the top editors.
• Looking more broadly at gender inequality in society and the percentage of women in top editorial positions, we find no meaningful correlation. Countries that score well on the UN Gender Inequality Index, such as Finland and Spain, have relatively few women among the top editors.
• There is notable variation in the number of people who get news from outlets with a female top editor from–at the high end, 81% in Kenya and 80% in South Africa to–at the low end–24% in Brazil and 5% in Japan.

The factsheet was authored by Kirsten Eddy, a Research Fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism; Meera Selva, Director of the Journalist Fellowship Programme and Deputy Director at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism; and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, Director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and Professor of Political Communication at the University of Oxford.

The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism is dedicated to exploring the future of journalism worldwide.