By Jasper Taylor
Research conducted by 4thestate.com has shown a substantial lack of women being quoted in the media during the election coverage.
This even includes stories on ‘women’s issues’, such as abortion and women’s rights. On the subject of abortion, in print media, women were quoted only 12% of the time with men at 81%. This slightly improved on the issues of birth control and planned parenthood, with women quoted on the subjects 19% and 26% respectively.
Perhaps the most ironic statistic though is that women were only quoted 31% of the time on the subject of women’s rights, with their male counterparts being quoted 51% of the time.
The major newspapers of America are using quotes from men a huge majority of the time. The Washington Post only quote women 14% of the time, with The New York Times marginally better at 15%. The highest figure out of the worst top five was USA Today, who quote women 19% of the time.
The total percentage of women’s quotes in print media was 13%.
TV news shows did not fair much better though. The worst being CNN’s ‘State of the Union’, who only quoted women 12% of the time and a staggering 87% of their quotes were from men and 1% from organisations. In total, only 16% of quotes on news shows were by women.
The female vote is proving to be a crucial one, with both Obama and Romney focussing on women and women’s issues in the run up to the election. The issue of equality was discussed in the second presidential debate, which lead to the widely spread ‘binder full of women’ quote from Romney.