Under the May 2016 Wall Street Journal headline “Islamic State Bombings Kill Dozens in Baghdad,” we read the following: “The first bomb struck a crowded market in the predominantly Shiite Muslim neighborhood of Sadr City, killing at least 62 people and wounding 86, mostly women and children.” In April, under the Washington Post headline “U.S.-Russia Cooperation Frays as Syria Truce Falls Apart,” we learn that “at least 90 people, including more than two dozen women and children, have been killed over the last four days in shelling and airstrikes by the Russian-backed Syrian government on rebel-held zones in the strategic city of Aleppo.” In both of these articles, women appear as an afterthought: while their presence is certainly emotionally powerful, they remain a parenthetical note to the “real” story.
The examples I’ve provided above represent the extent of women’s representation across much of the journalism that I have examined in an ongoing media analysis through New America’s Better Life Lab. Since September, I’ve catalogued search results for terms such as “Iraq + women” or “Afghanistan + women + peace” in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal to discover patterns in their 2016 reporting on women in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and South Sudan.
[For more of this story, written by Carolina Marques de Mesquita, go to https://psmag.com/beyond-the-h...559f77f6f#.m5qkcthw4]
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