Automated tools allow news organisations to easily measure the gender balance in their content without significantly increasing staff workload.
WIN GENDER TRACKER
Women in News has created an internal tool to track gender balance in content against several of the indicators showcased in Chapter 5. WIN uses the Gender Tracker to analyse news content in WIN focus countries and to track trends and progress over time. It is currently being used as an internal tool with plans to make it available to the media industry in the future.
GENDER EQUALITY TRACKER
The Gender Equality Tracker monitors the rep-resentation of men and women in content across several news organisations in a specific country. The software reads newly published articles and counts how many times it finds men’s or women’s names or pronouns.
INFORMED OPINIONS
Similar to the Gender Equality Tracker, Informed Opinions’ Gender Gap Tracker publicly ranks Canadian news outlets based on the ratio of women to men sources quoted in online cov-erage. It asks readers to contact the respective outlets to encourage them to pay more attention to gender balance.
GENDERMEME
GenderMeme is an open-source tool which can conduct large scale analyses of gender balance in content using natural language processing. It can also be used by organisations that want to build their own tools.
HER HEADLINE
Her Headline is a Chrome extension to highlight sexist language in sports media. The extension picks up gender biased words and phrases and explains why they are problematic. Her Headline is a Unesco initiative developed with the support of Cambridge University Press.
There are a range of hi-fi and lo-fi approaches to measure gender balance from off-the-shelf online tools, to bespoke in-house tools to spreadsheets and basic manual counts. There are a number of options to choose from to fit your organisation’s resources.
