Journalism Major Is Ruled By Women, So Why Are Men Running the Show?

Good news: Women now make up over two-thirds of journalism majors. Bad news: Regardless of their degree and passion for the field, women are credited with less than 40 percent of bylines and anchor jobs. Why are all the jobs going to men?

USA Today has taken a look at the journalism major at The University of Florida and the results are surprising. While author Antara Sinha points out that women are dominating the journalism classroom (a man Sinha interviewed says he is often the only male in a group) the same can’t be sad for newsrooms and newscasts around the US, with women taking a much smaller piece of the credit for writing about and presenting what’s going on in the world. And if you think that this doesn’t extent to topics that are considered to be more traditionally “female” (whatever that means), a new study done by the Women’s Media Center has got some sobering news for you and your friends Rory Gilmore and Paris Geller:

Men did 61% of the entertainment reporting in 2014. Although, along with health and lifestyle writing, entertainment was among the fields closest to reaching gender parity in the workplace. The topics with the greatest gender gap, with women in the minority, were world politics, and crime and justice.

The WMC study considered 20 of the most widely circulated U.S. based newspapers, TV networks, online news sites, and news wires.

The greatest offender? Of the news outlets examined, The New York Times had the widest gender gap in total bylines of all topics, with women credited for only 30.9% of published articles.

Women in the journalism major are, unsurprisingly, upset by this news. One told USA Today that it doesn’t seem fair that a woman would go to the same school as her male counterpart, get the same grades and do the same work, but then get a lesser story or be picked over for a job. Yeah, that isn’t fair, but nothing will change unless people in the field of journalism begin thinking about how to change the infrastructure of the profession. Too much of the time, when statistics like these are brought up, men think that it’s an attack on them for not doing enough. But it’s not. It’s an attack on the system that allows such disparity. Perhaps these latest numbers can propel the profession a step closer to parity.