Categories: OLD Media Moves

Study: Male CEOs treated differently than female CEOs in coverage

A Rockefeller Foundation study could not find a single news article written about a male CEO that mentioned family life, according to a report from Emily Peck of The Huffington Post.

Peck writes, “But perhaps most significantly, female CEOs are more often blamed when things go wrong at their company. When a company led by a woman was in crisis, 80 percent of the news stories on the situation cited the CEO as a source of the problem, according to Rockefeller’s analysis.

“When a man was running the company in crisis, stories only blamed him 31 percent of the time.

“That’s a huge difference and it’s no accident, Judith Rodin, president of the Rockefeller Foundation told The Huffington Post.

“‘There’s an unconscious bias among the media around how they write about female CEOs,’ Rodin said, emphasizing that this is not her opinion. ‘The data show that.'”

Read more here.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.