Sexism at NPR?

I've been asking myself the following question, "is it my imagination, or does NPR have significantly more stories on female topics than male"? Seemingly every single day I see nominally 1-3 stories on women's issues, and maybe one on men's issues.

So I decided to sit down and see if I could answer this question with data. Fortunately NPR has a web API allowing me to write a program to extract not only the stories, but the story metadata. Additionally NPR tags each story to identify their subject.

Edit 1: The program used as a basis for this post.

Tags

NPR has 23,529 tags - really too many to analyze manually in a short amount of time. I wrote a program to extract the tags that I identified as related to female issues.

Female tags

1. Pink ribbon breast cancer awareness
2. Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead
3. American Association of University Women
4. Girl Scout cookies
5. for colored girls
6. Afghan women
7. women's heatlh
8. Gay Girl in Damascus
9. Word Girl
10. African-American female members of Congress
11. Leadership Conference of Women Religious
12. vegetarian mothers
13. unmarried black women
14. adoptive couple v. baby girl
15. single mothers
16. The Real Girl's Guide to Everything Else
17. Golden Girls
18. most powerful women
19. single women
20. comfort women
21. new mothers
22. Mothers 2 Mothers
23. women in tech
24. daughter
25. daughters
26. The Other Boleyn Girl
27. women's world cup soccer
28. girl
29. women's rights
30. black women
31. Grammar Girl
32. teenage girls
33. Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film
34. Girl Scouts
35. female governors races
36. Fly Girls
37. International Women's Day
38. breast cancer
39. American Girl
40. Day of the Girl
41. girl vs. lion video
42. women's ski jump
43. Pioneer Women
44. girls basketball
45. Girls
46. Violence Against Women Act
47. Girls Rock
48. teen girls
49. International Day of the Girl Child
50. representation of women
51. gilmore girls
52. Saudi women voting
53. women
54. women and Islam
55. Saudi women driving
56. women's issues
57. women CEOs
58. women farmers
59. Women's Health
60. women in combat
61. women in government
62. adolescent girls
63. girl rising
64. women in politics
65. women in science
66. pregnant women
67. Scottish girl food blog
68. India's Daughter
69. women in tech, data
70. Women's Figure Skating
71. women's basketball
72. Rock and Roll Camp for Girls
73. black women and marriage
74. missing women
75. girls' rights
76. Cameron's daughter
77. Gossip Girl
78. female genital mutilation
79. black girls matter
80. sexism
81. female vote
82. Super Girl
83. feminism
84. Republicans and women
85. #15Girls
86. pregnant girls
87. women's skiing
88. women's soccer
89. women's World Cup
90. women's studies
91. sexism in tech
92. Mother's Day
93. ovarian transplant
94. changing lives of women
95. 15girls
96. Girl Talk
97. mother-daughter relationships
98. working women
99. mothers
100. National Anthem girl
101. female commentators
102. violence against women
103. Grandmother Fish
104. Texas judge beats daughter
105. discrimination against women
106. Girl Up
107. Grandma drummer
108. Powerpuff Girls
109. women's right
110. Weary working mothers
111. women's history month
112. breast cancer, mastectomy, Samantha Harris
113. center for american women and politics
114. male-to-female ratio
115. A Breast Cancer Alphabet

Male tags

These are the male tags:

1. My Three Sons
2. men on tv
3. men's basketball
4. men's clothing
5. Men's Figure Skating
6. Men's Health
7. sexiest men
8. Men's Journal
9. men's rights
10. Scottsboro Boys
11. men's soccer
12. fear of black men
13. boys
14. 10-year-old boy
15. Boy Scouts
16. creepy men on motorcycles
17. Balloon Boy
18. like father like son
19. magnet boy
20. educating black boys
21. Boys on the Bus
22. boy dropped to firefighter
23. Forest boy
24. sons of confederate veterans
25. Yes Men
26. Boy Scouts of America
27. bubble boy
28. fathers
29. lost boys
30. prostate
31. Lost Boys of Sudan
32. male supremacy
33. yukon men
34. Father's Day
35. black male privilege
36. prostate cancer
37. Father Dollar Bill
38. Fat Boys
39. black men
40. male-to-female ratio
41. The Last Boy
42. Big Trap Boy
43. men
44. trans male
45. Hope's Boy

These are hardly a clean list of tags. Both lists have tags that don't really belong, and are surely missing some tags that do. "Balloon Boy" probably has nothing to do with boys vs. girls issues, and "Super Girl" may only be about the upcoming movie - nothing else. My guess is that these invalid tags likely only bring in a few stories that don't belong - so probably don't skew the numbers dramatically.

That being said, there are a few observations:

1. There are 2.5x the number of "female" tags than "male".
2. I don't see a single pejorative female tag title.
3. There are several pejorative male tag titles:
1. black male privilege
2. creepy men on motorcycles
3. fear of black men
4. Yes Men
5. Fat Boys

Stories

I first downloaded 154,554 stories covering 2010 through December 2015. I then wrote a program to analyze all story tags from the two lists above.

 

Overall there are

1. 5.38 times more female stories than male.
2. 2.26 times the number of stories about girls than boys.
3. 2.84 times the number of stories about female cancer than male.
4. 7.8 times the number of general female stories than male. By general I mean once you've removed cancer, and youth totals.

Summary

So I guess my real question is, "is NPR biased against men"? One can, and many do, argue that the world has been a man's world for a very long time now, and now that women are making inroads to male spaces (business, government, military, etc.), these are newsworthy, and explain the greater attention to "female" stories than "male".

I don't know - I'm not a statistician or scientist - so can't say for sure. This was a very unscientific one day analysis, so I hesitate to draw more than a general impression from what I've seen so far. However, my general impression is that these totals skew very strongly toward women. Given that breast cancer kills about 50% more woman than prostate cancer kills men (according to the CDC) why are nearly three times the number of stories about breast cancer than prostate cancer? Are girls worthy of well over twice our attention than boys? The largest disparity are stories about healthy adult men and women - why are there nearly eight times the stories about women's issues?

Does NPR care about men?