This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: A media "glass ceiling" exists in news stories on artificial intelligence (AI) published in Spanish media in recent years: men are the main subjects in 41% of news reports, compared to just 5% featuring women. This is one of the findings of the report "InfoIA: Analysis of Information on Artificial Intelligence Published in Digital Media," conducted by the University Institute of Gender Studies at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M).
The report analyzes a scientific corpus consisting of 7,115 news stories, 13,787 journalistic sources and 11,266 photographs and images published between 2017 and 2021 and in 2024. All data were manually gathered by about 20 researchers who are currently developing, as part of another scientific project, an algorithm to automatically analyze biases in media coverage. According to the report, the distribution of media focus on individuals appearing in the analyzed period is highly unequal by gender: 41.60% focuses on men; 39.06% is mixed; 14.01% adopts a neutral focus; and 5.33% focuses on women.
The study also examines proper names in headlines: 13.11% of all news stories feature a man's name, while a woman's name appears in only 4.19% (the majority of headlines are neutral—entities—or contain no proper names). "The exclusive presence of women records lower visibility throughout the study, confirming a profound invisibility of women," the report concludes. Regarding journalistic sources, men account for 61.14% of quotes compared to 21.45% for women, with the disparity reaching more than 4 to 1 in C-suite or presidential positions.
"Men are interviewed far more often as experts than women," concludes the study's lead author, Clara Sainz de Baranda, professor of journalism in UC3M's Department of Communication. Stories bylined by female journalists tend to include a higher proportion of female sources (25.58%) than those bylined by men (18.96%). Nevertheless, male bylines dominate newsrooms (49.02% vs. 27.51% for women).
Furthermore, the surge of corporate and institutional sources in 2024 (29.90%) has tended to displace space for independent female experts. Narratives regarding technical development, corporate strategy and the economics of AI are almost entirely dominated by male or institutional voices and images. The space granted to women is concentrated in academic research (where they represent 29.26% of sources in that sector) and in analyzing the social, ethical, educational or cultural impact of technology.
The report also analyzes sexist language, showing that while it has improved overall in news media, biases remain, such as the use of the generic masculine. "When reading a news story that mentions 'experts,' the mind defaults to viewing experts as men. Therefore, female researchers and women in general must be made more visible in language," notes Sainz de Baranda.
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