Despite decades of progress by women in the nation's newsrooms, female writers are still a rarity on the opinion-editorial pages that help drive important public discourse, a UT Arlington assistant communication professor has found.

Dustin Harp's newly published study found that while two-fifths of female-penned columns at the top U.S. newspapers were about "hard news" subjects such as politics and economics, these women writers are often relegated to writing about traditionally feminine topics, including parenting and health. A more concerning finding of the research, however, is the sheer lack of female columnists given space on opinion pages.

Harp, a gender and communication expert in the UT Arlington College of Liberal Arts, co-authored the paper "Where are the Women? The Presence of Female Columnists in U.S. Opinion Pages," which appears in the June issue of Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly.

"We hope our study will lead news organizations to reconsider the inclusion of female voices and to carefully examine their hiring and promotion policies," Harp said. "Females make up more than 50 percent of the U.S. population and when women are permitted to join the conversation, they provide a distinct and needed perspective."

Beth Wright, dean of the UT Arlington College of Liberal Arts, said Harp's work "contributes to the ongoing dialogue about women's roles in society and the need for diversity in the workplace."

Along with the lack of women writers on the opinion pages, Harp and her colleagues found that women are less likely than men to be sources or appear in authoritative roles in news stories, are depicted less frequently than males and less prominently, such as appearing further down in the columns, with fewer quotes or only paraphrased, and in relation to topics deemed less substantive, such as parenting, education or gardening.

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