Fast Company, February 13, 2020: Filter out male privilege, and the web can be a ghost town
We’ve all heard about the gender gap, the fact that men make more money working the same jobs that women do, and that men have more of a voice in politics and in the media. Indeed, in my profession, 60% of bylines belong to men—and that figure jumps to nearly 70% if you look specifically at breaking news.
But this phenomenon is mostly invisible. It’s hard to glance at The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal and instantly know how much of the content was written by women or men, unless you’re in the mood to count bylines. Or it was, until the U.K. data and design studio Normally developed the Gendered Web plug-in, a filter for news sites that makes every story written by men disappear, so that only the voices of women remain.
