Women Don't Make The Cover

Apparently news and business magazines aren't for the ladies. At least not the covers.

Beverly Wettenstein has a fascinating article on Huffington Post where she tracked the magazine covers of five weekly magazines: Business Week, Forbes, Fortune, Newsweek and
Time throughout 2006 to see how many covers featured women or were written by them. The numbers aren't good and everyone should check out her article.

If women's presence in the business magazine world and the so-called "serious" newsweeklies aren't seen except for the annual "50 Most Powerful Women in Business" (Fortune) and "Women & Leadership"(Newsweek) issues, then what does that imply about the other 51 weeks?

Wettenstein also suggests that others continue tracking covers for 2007, which is a great idea. Tracking women's presence in media is a good way to see where we aren't.

The National Women's Editorial Forum is also conducting such a study involving the editorial pages of daily newspaper and we also encourage others to help. Simply read your local paper (or papers) and scan its editorial pages. Log onto our website and (after registering to be an editorial page monitor) it will take you to the electronic form. We need monitors to provide information about their paper and the op-eds that are present on its pages. With the Women's Monitor, NWEF will be able to gather data from all over the country about how often women are featured and what they are saying.

---Rachel Joy Larris