Guardian, Wednesday 30th April 2008

Today is an important day for this project, so read on...

I've wondered from the start what to do when a single letter has multiple signatories, but I made a decision to count all of them. There are two letters today with multiple signatories, hence the high numbers (which are also typically disproportionate):


Now, this is very interesting. One of today's letters, on the subject of the 60th anniversary of Israel, has 105 signatories in total. For the sake of space, the letters editor has selected 21 of them to be named in the paper - 14 men and 7 women, see below:


BUT the paper has printed all 105 names in the online version here. And guess what: more than half of them (59) are women*.

So, evidence of a gender bias on the letters page? It certainly looks like it...


* I'm confident of this, because where the gender wasn't obvious from the name, I googled the person in question, and found all their genders.

Guardian, Tuesday 29th April 2008

Back to normal for today's tally:


...although once again women are given a greater share of voice on a gender-related issue: this time it's how employers should address maternity leave and childcare requirements.

Guardian, Monday 28th April 2008

Cor blimey, strike a light, for the first time since records began (although that was only the week before last, admittedly), there are more letters from women in today's Guardian than from men.

Feast your eyes on this rarity:


And what is it that's prompted the ladies to write to the Guardian in such numbers? Well, the ongoing argument about whether it's wrong that more money gets donated to donkey sanctuaries than to domestic violence charities, for one. But also the 10p tax band fiasco, which - unsurprisingly - seems to be riling up men and women equally, and funding for education, which may or may not be a 'women's issue'.

Good show, and I still think that this kind of thing indicates that women *do* write letters to the editor. But one swallow does not a summer make, and so forth, so we'll see what happens over the course of the rest of the week...

Observer, Sunday 27th April

After a good start for the Observer, not such a great showing this week:


And here are the topics:

Guardian, Week Total 21-26 April 2008

Bearing in mind that the gender split in the Guardian readership is 57% men and 43% women, let's have a look at the distribution of letters over the past week (Monday 21st to Saturday 26th April):


(Ind. = 'Indeterminate')

It's not looking representative, is it? Although we still don't know why...

Guardian, Saturday 26th April 2008

Sorry for the delay, I have been by the seaside watching small children roll a small rock down a big rock. Here's Saturday's tally:


And here are the topics:

Guardian, 25th April 2008

Given the ratio of male to female readers of the Guardian (57:43), this is the kind of distribution we ought to see on the letters page every day:


So, why so many women today, compared to every other day this week? Let's have a look at the issues covered:


At first glance, it looks like Tim might have had a point about letters from women only being published when they're about 'women's issues'.

But there are also three letters from women about the abolition of the 10p tax band. You could say this *is* a women's issue, because women tend to earn less, and therefore as a constituency they're more affected by the abolition - but it hasn't been positioned as one to date.

Viewed another way, today's distribution might suggest that women do in fact write letters to the editor on enough topics and in enough numbers for the Guardian to be able to represent its female readership (that's 43% of its readers) more fairly on the letters page.

Remember, the whole point of this exercise is to question the Guardian letters editor's assertion that the editorially-controlled letters page provides a better service to busy Guardian readers than the free-for-all of online commenting...

Guardian, 24th April 2008

A pretty poor showing today...


...perhaps these are 'men's issues', though:


I'm starting to get anecdotes from people who've worked in the newspaper business.

Leonie said:

'I once worked for a newspaper near my home town (in southern Germany). Very often I had to walk around with pen, paper and camera and do little opinion polls on the issue of the day. Very quickly it became clear to me that most women (of any age) did not want to share their opinions, and almost all men were very eager to explain their point of view to me and were clearly looking forward to having it published in the paper.'

'So unless people are very different in other countries, I think one part of the explanation could be that women simply do not write as many letters as men.'

And Malc said:

'During a brief spell as a sub-editor on the letters page of my former workplace (the Express & Star in Wolverhampton) I asked how we chose which ten or 12 of the 60 letters in the basket would be published. "Choose the ones that fit the space, but no lefties or other low-life," I was told. I left soon after.'

Does anyone else have any insight into how newspapers letters pages work, or how disposed either gender is to write letters to the editor?


P.S. Is it just me, or are these charts getting smaller and smaller? Hmmm.

Guardian, 23rd April 2008

Today's tally:


Tim suggested I look at the issues that people are writing about, to see if women's letters are more likely to be published if they're about 'women's issues'. So I've added a new chart. It's lucky I'm so fond of raw data...


Also, yesterday Miss-Cellany sent me this 2006 article from the News & Observer newspaper in Carolina, which looks at the same issue: do newspaper letters pages genuinely reflect 'the voice of the people'?

Two academics studied 1,400 readers' letters published in the News & Observer, and their findings were reported in the paper as follows (my emphasis):

'These letters represent a basic and important form of political participation -- a way for Americans to voice their opinions and affect the political process,' [the professors] write in an academic paper.

But, the professors say, the letters 'do not seem to reflect the opinions of 'regular Americans,' but rather show systematic biases.' The letters pages give more voice to men than women, according to their research, and therefore more attention to what they term men's issues such as defense and government than to women's concerns such as education and civil rights.

Regardless of whether or not you agree with these assessments of what constitute 'men's' and 'women's' issues (surely all the issues listed are of equal importance to men and women?), it'll be interesting to watch how the Guardian and Observer shape up in terms of how much 'opinion-space' they allocate to each gender on different topics.

Guardian, 22nd April 2008

Today's chart...


Why am I recording the gender of people whose letters are published in the Guardian and the Observer? Find out here.

'Quality' And Inequality, Part 2

(Cross-posted from my personal blog, Quinquireme.)

Thanks to all of you for your great comments and suggestions on the last post. Here are some answers in a bit more depth:

My dad said: 'Why stop there, apart from small considerations like work? The same exercise applied to the The Times and Daily Telegraph, not to mention the Sun and The Sunday Post, would throw up grist to all sorts of mills.'

I have no doubt that it would - the only reason I chose the Guardian/Observer is that we get the paper every day and so it's no big hardship to do a bit of counting on the letters page. Plus, these are the papers where I would least expect to see a gender bias, but I'm pretty sure there is one, and that's what I'm aiming to find out. Heaven forbid that anyone should mistake this for a scientific survey, incidentally - as we established in the last thread, there are just too many unknowns for that to be possible. But if someone did a proper scientific study across all the papers, I'd be very interested to read it.

Dave said: 'Of course, now you've alerted them, they'll change their policy (or the genders of the names they chose to append to the letters [which as we all know, they make up for themselves anyway]). What you should do is go through last year's back copies'.

In my more megalomaniacal moments I do like to imagine that the entire editorial staff of all the quality national dailies read this blog, but in reality I think the chances of Nigel Willmott and his oppo on the Observer dropping by are fairly remote. And even if he/they did, they probably wouldn't take any notice, because I am a) a scummy blogger and b) a WOMAN hur hur hur oh get me and my biting invective, etc. I do agree re. the back copies, though, so this morning I rifled meticulously through the recycling bag and salvaged ten or so recent copies of the Guardian and the Observer...results coming soon (I can exclusively reveal that things are already looking significantly less dubious for the Observer than the Graun, though).

Semaphore, Tim Footman, OPC and James all said something about: 'But how do you know that equal numbers of men and women write the letters in the first place?'

For me this is the most important point - if 75% of letters to the Guardian are written by men, I shouldn't expect there to be a near-50:50 balance in the ones selected for publication. Tim suggests I send a polite email to N. Willmott to find out, which I intend to do very soon...stay tuned for updates. Having said that, it's already looking like the Observer has more of a balance than the Guardian, which might be significant.

Collected Voices said: 'If women's letters don't get published in newspapers (I've sent a few the Guardian's way with no success), then maybe the women stop bothering to try (I certainly have).'

And this is what I am hoping, eventually, to find out. Personally, I've had successes and failures in sending letters to editors, and it must be difficult to choose just 15 or so out of a daily mailbag of 300. I'm interested to know if women are being (thinkingly or unthinkingly) filtered out of that selection process - and if so, how the papers in question can still claim to be providing a service to their readership, which is fairly equally split in terms of gender (Guardian 57:43 male-to-female ratio, Observer 54:46).

And lastly, Boz provides some words of wisdom for all would-be letter-writers: 'Everyone is entitled to an opinion. If you are going to enforce that opinion on others please make it interesting'.

And to that point, thank you and hurrah to all of you lot, who all have interesting things to say, despite this being the uncontrolled no-mans-land of the blogosphere where only lunatics, obsessives and harrumphers are thought to roam.

Anyway, apparently I have to do some work now, in order to earn money and stuff, so I will leave you with today's tally:


See the original, commented version of this post here.

'Quality' And Inequality, Part 1

(Cross-posted from my personal blog, Quinquireme.)

Despite the fact that blogging has been around for 11 years now, it seems that some journalists are no closer to coming to terms with the fact that *anyone* can now publish their opinions to the world.

I read an article in the Guardian recently about how the letters pages of newspapers have a superior 'quality of debate' compared with comments threads appended to articles. The reason the quality of debate is superior, says the article, is that newspaper letters pages are subject to editorial control.

'Online services, who thought they could do without editors, are now seeing their merits again. Our job on the letters pages is to do the work for our busy readers,' the Guardian's letters editor Nigel Willmott is quoted as saying.

But I'm wondering if Nigel isn't actually doing his readership a huge disservice. In the free-for-all of the blogosphere, there's almost equal representation between men and women. The Pew Internet survey of American bloggers in 2006 discovered that 46% were women, for example. And when I did a mini-survey of the UK blogosphere earlier this year for my old company, I discovered that of 100 blogs selected at random, 39 were written by women and 38 by men (with the others it was too difficult to tell).

Given that men and women make up just about equal proportions of the population, and given that men and women are more or less equally inclined towards expressing their views publicly, it should follow that the Guardian's letters pages should reflect that kind of near-equality.

But I don't think they do, and now I want to prove it. So, armed with my trusty copy of Microsoft Excel, I'm planning to record the division of representation between men and women in the Guardian's - and the Observer's - letters pages, every day from now on, until either I get bored or the entire Guardian Media Group folds under the AWFUL PRESSURE of my AUDACIOUS citizen journalism.

(Obviously I'm going to be deciding a correspondent's gender mainly from their name, so there are going to be margins of error, and some people only give their initials, in which case I'll just put them down as 'indeterminate'. Bear in mind too that the Guardian, by its own admission, receives 300 letters, faxes and emails every day, so it's not like they've only got a small sample to choose from.)

Come with me then, ladies and gentlemen, on a journey into the psyche of the Guardian's and Observer's letters editors, as they exercise their superior editorial judgment over whose opinion merits publication and whose doesn't:




(With thanks to my brother for showing me how to save an Excel chart as a JPEG.)

NB Of course, if I'm wrong about my hunch, rest assured I will bake an enormous humble pie and eat it LIVE on this blog.

See the original, commented version of this post here.