“If I was a young girl right now, and I saw that a TV reporter/anchor wore her hair natural — and say I wasn’t sure about the way I wanted to wear my hair — seeing that woman wear her hair natural would make me feel so good and make me feel so empowered.”

According to an analysis of fact-checking outlets around the world, about 41% of fact-checkers are women. In more than half of the individual organizations analyzed, women made up less than 50% of the editorial staff. And when looking at the heads of each fact-checking site surveyed, women are further outnumbered. In addition, about 71% of fact-checking sites are run by men.

Atkins anchors the BBC's "Outside Sources" TV and radio programs, among the most popular in the BBC News division. Early in his career, he said, he talked to bosses about his concerns that so few women appeared as experts or contributors in BBC shows. He said he imagined what would happen if he could collect data on how many women appear on his program.

A study in the UK found that female journalists received three times as much abuse on Twitter as their male colleagues. The frustrating aspect of this abuse for many female journalists is that the negative feedback is not usually about their work, but instead is more likely to be based on their gender or sexuality. The harassment extends from individual women to their family and friends, and it has the potential to drive female journalists to spend less time engaging with audiences or into different careers.

"Over the course of January, we monitored nuclear weapons policy pieces and found 28 stories that featured male non-governmental experts exclusively. There are likely more, but almost one print piece a day seemed like enough proof of a phenomenon that we are now calling the marticle (man-article). The marticle is cousin to the manel, or the all-male panel. Manels are a regular feature of the nuclear policy world, but are subject to more focus and criticism. Many men in the non-governmental nuclear policy community say that they will not join panels without women or ones where the only woman is the moderator."

The report comes at a time when the nation’s population is changing rapidly. The U.S. Census projects that Blacks, Asians, Hispanics, Native Americans, Pacific Islanders, and those who are multi-racial will be the majority of the population by 2050. “Women are more than half the U.S. population, and people of color nearly 40 percent,” said Julie Burton, president of the Women’s Media Center. “But you wouldn’t know this from our media — because U.S. media does not look like, sound like, or reflect the diversity and experience of more than half the population.”