USA Today newsroom now majority female

The newsroom of USA Today is now predominately female, the outlet announced this week. 

A recent internal company survey found women made up 51.7 percent of all journalists at the newspaper, which also saw gains in its percentage of Black employees, at 13.6 percent; Hispanic staffers, 10.1 percent; and Asian American employees, 7 percent. Overall, journalists of color account for 34 percent of the newsroom, USA Today Editor-in-Chief Nicole Carroll wrote on Wednesday. 

“It’s a proud moment to see the progress we’ve made in hiring and retaining women, particularly women of color, to reach this milestone,” Carroll wrote. 

Holly Moore, USA Today Network planning director, said the designation matters because “the news industry records history and for a very long time that history has been written from a male gaze.” 

The newspaper was founded in 1982, when women comprised only a little more than 30 percent of all journalists working in the United States. 

The first time USA Today recorded the sexes of its staff, women were 27.6 percent of the staff, a number that only inched up to 29 percent by 2001. 

“I recall that women were always about one-third of the newsroom’s total professionals, which pretty much aligned our newsroom with the newspaper industry,” the paper quoted a former top editor, Wanda Lloyd, who worked there in the late 1980s and early 1990s. “I was proud to work in a newsroom where women were leaders in all sections. At one time or another in the early years, women held the top positions in News, Life, International, USA WEEKEND, Cover Stories and the Editorial Page.”

Maribel Perez Wadsworth, president of parent company Gannett and publisher of USA Today, published an op-ed separate from Carroll’s report on Wednesday pledging to intensify the media company’s commitment to an inclusive and diverse newsroom representative of national demographics.