Are women only a quarter of the people in the news?

Unlike our other explainers, this one does not rest on an official statistics agency. No government agency in Canada or the US measures who appears in the news. The main source is the Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP), coordinated by the World Association for Christian Communication every five years since 1995.

On one chosen day, volunteer teams in each country record every news story in a sample of outlets and code each person in it: whether they are a woman or a man, what role they play and who reported the story. It is the longest-running and widest study of its kind, and it publishes its method. But a single day of news can be dominated by a few big stories, and the national samples are small. Canada’s team monitored 28 outlets in 2020.

The headline figure is the share of news subjects and sources who are women: everyone a story is about, or who is quoted or interviewed in it. In 2025, across print, radio and television news in more than 90 countries, it was 26%, up one point since 2020 and nine points since 1995.

The 2025 highlights report that North American news media are closest to parity, at about four in ten. We have not found separate 2025 figures for Canada and the US. In 2020, women were 31% of subjects and sources in Canadian print, radio and television news and 38% online. In the US they were 34% and 32%.

In 2020, women were 41% of the experts in US news, up from 22% in 2005, and 43% of those quoted as experts and commentators in Canada, up from under 30% in both 2010 and 2015. Women were more often in the news for their personal experience: 48% of people giving personal experience in the US were women.

Who delivers the news varies a lot by medium. In the US in 2020, women were 63% of television reporters and presenters monitored, but 37% on radio. In Canada, women were 49% of reporters on news websites but 37% in print.

Supported: worldwide, women are about a quarter of the people in traditional news, and the share has risen slowly over 30 years.

Misleading: applying the worldwide figure to Canada or the US. Both countries had a higher share, about a third in 2020, and North America was the region closest to parity in 2025.

Not established: why. News coverage partly reflects who holds positions that make news, such as political office, and partly editorial choices about whom to quote. These figures do not separate the two.

Both countries used the same coding method on the global monitoring day in September 2020, so the figures are more comparable than in our other explainers. The national samples are still small and were chosen by each team, so differences of a few points between the countries should not be read as meaningful.

The 2020 monitoring day fell during the pandemic, when health stories dominated the news. The US report notes that women were only 18% of experts in science and health stories that day, compared with 56% in 2015.

The GMMP records people as women or men. People of other genders are not shown separately in these figures, so men’s shares are 100% minus women’s.

When the GMMP publishes 2025 national reports for Canada and the US, this explainer will be updated.