Women are seen more than heard in online news
It has long been argued that women are under-represented and marginalised in relation to men in the world's news media. New research, using artificial intelligence (AI), has analysed over two million articles to find out how gender is represented in online news. The study, which is the largest undertaken to date, found men's views and voices are represented more in online news than women's. What is perhaps more interesting is that the research found - while being overall under-represented - women appear proportionally more in images than men, while men are mentioned more in text than women. A breakdown of topics shows that women feature more in articles about fashion, followed by entertainment and art, while being least present in topics including sport and politics. A team of AI experts at the University of Bristol's Intelligent Systems Laboratory (ISL), led by Nello Cristianini , Professor of Artificial Intelligence, teamed up with social scientist, Dr Cynthia Carter from Cardiff University, to ask a very old question on a very new scale. How many men and how many women are mentioned in the news, or portrayed in newspaper images, over a long period of time and in over hundreds of different newspapers? Modern AI, which is frequently in the news, is a great tool to support research and can automate tasks that would take humans an impossible amount of person-hours to complete.
