Women comprise about half of nonprofit news personnel. This mirrors the U.S. population, but diverges sharply from the nonprofit sector, where women comprise a much higher proportion of the workforce.
Across all personnel reported by INN members in 2022, 51.4% are women (Figure 5). This is similar to the percentage of female persons in the U.S. population (50.4%), as measured by the U.S. Census. It is also slightly higher than women’s representation in the U.S. workforce as a whole (46.8%), according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.21 By contrast, data from Independent Sector show that women are much more heavily represented within the nonprofit sector, comprising 64.4% of the workforce.22 That is 13 points higher than the percentage of women among nonprofit news personnel.
Within the news industry, nonprofit outlets have a higher proportion of women personnel than many other news outlets.
For example, RTDNA’s 2022 survey shows that women were a minority of the TV news workforce (44.7%) and the radio news workforce (39.5%). RTDNA’s data further show that women’s representation was particularly weak in commercial radio news (23.9%), as opposed to non-commercial radio news (50.2%). Similar to race and ethnicity, we lack comprehensive data on the gender composition of digital and print outlets, but available data from individual outlets indicate that women remain a minority in some major news organizations, such as Gannett (42%) and The Washington Post (44.9%), but are more strongly represented in others like The New York Times (55%).23
Women’s representation in nonprofit news outlets extends to the leadership level, surpassing the level of women’s leadership at other peer news organizations.
Women occupy a little over half (52.3%) of the top three executive positions and 60.4% of other executive and manager positions (Figure 6). Moreover, many nonprofit news outlets are women-led organizations, which we define as organizations in which women hold more than 50% of executive and manager positions. A little less than half (46.8%) of nonprofit news organizations fell into this category of having majority-women leadership.
These patterns are notable, given that women are underrepresented in leadership positions in many news outlets and in the U.S. workforce as a whole. RTDNA’s data show that women hold a much smaller percentage of news director positions in TV news (40.5%) and radio news (24.3%). Women are also underrepresented at the leadership level at Gannett (42%) and The Washington Post (47%). Within the U.S. workforce more broadly, data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics indicate that women comprise 40.5% of employees in management positions, and their share of chief executive positions is even smaller: 29.2%.24
Beyond the binary of “man” and “woman,” people who identify with additional or other gender categories comprise a very small percentage of nonprofit news staff and leadership.
News outlets reported that 1.6% of personnel identify as nonbinary or nonconforming. Approximately 0.6% of individuals identify as transgender — the same percentage as the U.S. population, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.25 However, we caution against drawing definitive conclusions about the representation of transgender people, given that news organizations responded “don’t know” for about 39% of the total number of individuals reported in the survey.
Dimensions of diversity we didn’t capture in the 2023 Index
While race, ethnicity and gender are salient dimensions of diversity, we recognize that there are many other characteristics relevant to understanding diversity in newsrooms, such as socioeconomic background, age, education or lived experience. A key challenge for INN centers on gathering accurate information from news outlets, particularly when we are asking about things that organizations do not typically track. A case in point: In the 2023 Index, we attempted to gather information about the number of individuals with disabilities, but we found that a sizable majority of respondents left the question blank. We also acknowledge that there are limits to what a survey can cover – and that some dimensions of diversity may be better explored with more flexible and qualitative approaches that invite reflection on nuance and context.
There was almost no change in the overall gender composition of nonprofit news leadership and staff between 2020 and 2022.
However, similar to our findings for race and ethnicity, we do observe variation in the direction of change within organizations over time. Just over a third of organizations showed an increase in women’s representation at the leadership level, while the remaining outlets were more or less evenly divided between no change and a decrease in the percentage of leadership positions held by women (Figure 7). This illustrates the “churn” in women’s representation among leadership underlying the overarching pattern of stability.
20. For purposes of analysis, we grouped news outlets into four categories of organization size: very small = 1-5 personnel (26% of news outlets); small = 6-10 personnel (27%); mid-sized = 11-20 personnel (22%); and large = 21 or more personnel (25%).
21. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey” (accessed August 2023).
22. Independent Sector, “Health of the U.S. Nonprofit Sector: A Quarterly Review,” Dec. 31, 2022.
23. Gannett, “Workforce Diversity: Representation Trends 2020 – 2023” (accessed August 2023). The New York Times, “2022 New York Times Diversity and Inclusion Report.” The Washington Post, “The Washington Post’s Workforce Demographics” July 28, 2022.
24. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey” (accessed August 2023).
25. U.S. Census Bureau, “Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity in the Household Pulse Survey” Nov. 4, 2021.
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