Women who speak about Artificial Intelligence in the Spanish digital press (2017-2021). Gender gaps in news sources

Abstract

This research aims to study news articles about Artificial Intelligence published in Spanish digital newspapers to determine whether there is a gender gap in news sources in relation to the proportion of women and men, the topics they address, their occupations, and the relationship between the gender of the journalist and that of the source. The final sample consisted of 4,132 sources extracted from 2,548 news items published between January 2017 and December 2021.

Our results reveal that only 23.59% of the sources are women; that there is a correlation between the gender of the journalist and that of the source; and that the professional category, position, or social status of the source differs depending on whether the source is a man or a woman.

The main contribution of this research lies in the fact that, in addition to quantifying the presence of women as news sources, it also incorporates –unlike previous studies– a detailed analysis of the occupation, professional category, and hierarchical or social position of the cited individuals. This approach allows us to observe not only who speaks in news coverage of Artificial Intelligence, but also from what symbolic and professional position they do so. The combination of gender and status dimensions reveals that inequalities extend beyond the mere number of female voices, encompassing the spaces of authority from which media discourse is constructed. This perspective helps capture, within the media sphere, the reflection of the persistent horizontal segregation in the scientific and technological fields. The results show that female sources are more frequently cited in topics such as equality, education, and culture, while male sources predominate in areas such as robotics, economics, politics, or software development –thus reproducing gender stereotypes in the selection of voices and in the legitimization of expert knowledge.