There’s a Gender Gap Among News Influencers on Social Media [Video]

News anchoring was once a male-dominated enterprise led by figures like Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow. That gender skew is showing up again in the latest platform for news: social media.

Male influencers far outnumber female creators when it comes to delivering the news on social media, according to a new study from the Pew Research Center.

Pew analyzed a sample set of 500 news influencers with at least 100,000 followers and found that 63% were male and 30% were female. The remaining 7% were either non-binary or had undetermined genders.

That gender gap stands out for a few reasons:

• First, there’s a much narrower gender divide (51% male and 46% female) among working US journalists, per a 2022 Pew survey.
• Second, women tend to outnumber men in the influencer industry broadly. Influencer agency Izea saw a gender gap when it compared the share of sponsorship deals earned by women (77%) and men (21%) in 2022.

As creators take on a bigger role …