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Women are still one-third of all full-time journalists working for the traditional mainstream media, as they have been since 1982, even though more women than ever are graduating from journalism school and entering the profession. Among journalists with fewer than five years of work experience, women are 54.2 percent, outnumbering men for the first time. Among all journalists, the largest proportion of women work for newsmagazines (43.5 percent) and the smallest for the major wire services (20.3 percent) and radio (21.9 percent). Women are 37.4 percent of television journalists, 36.9 percent of weekly newspaper journalists, and 33 percent of daily newspaper journalists.

Compared to the U.S. civilian work force in 2000, journalists are considerably less likely to be women (33 percent vs. 46.5 percent) and even less likely than the overall U.S. managerial and professional work force in 2000, which included 49.8 percent women. Retention, then, is an issue.

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