The short answer
31.8% of the people in German news are women. Counted across 28,590,503 names and pronouns in 5,522,934 articles from the biggest news sites in Germany in 2016. That is 2.1 mentions of a man for every mention of a woman.
This page covers 2016, the period for which the Prognosis project's five-minute readings for Germany are preserved: 105,802 readings, 5,522,934 articles. Every number here comes from counting, not from a survey. Software read each newly published article on German news sites as it appeared and counted the female and male first names and the pronouns. The method is explained below, and the whole dataset is yours to download.
Outlet by outlet
Ranked the way the tracker always ranked them: by distance to a 50/50 split, all years combined. zeit.de is closest at 37.9% women; stern.de furthest at 26.4%.
Bars run to 50%, so a full bar is parity. Share of women among names and pronouns, 2016.
| # | Site | Women | Articles | Names + pronouns | Gendered words / article |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | zeit.de | 37.9% | 278,485 | 3,259,317 | 11.7 |
| 2 | spiegel.de | 34.0% | 3,109,566 | 2,082,594 | 0.7 |
| 3 | welt.de | 33.8% | 144,220 | 2,757,425 | 19.1 |
| 4 | wiwo.de | 33.3% | 51,807 | 537,826 | 10.4 |
| 5 | stuttgarter-nachrichten.de | 33.2% | 22,492 | 245,611 | 10.9 |
| 6 | tagesspiegel.de | 33.0% | 144,306 | 2,120,694 | 14.7 |
| 7 | sueddeutsche.de | 31.4% | 148,299 | 2,225,413 | 15.0 |
| 8 | focus.de | 31.3% | 400,896 | 7,267,935 | 18.1 |
| 9 | handelsblatt.com | 30.7% | 145,347 | 1,156,807 | 8.0 |
| 10 | neues-deutschland.de | 29.4% | 47,755 | 421,812 | 8.8 |
| 11 | taz.de | 28.8% | 699,418 | 1,585,188 | 2.3 |
| 12 | faz.net | 28.6% | 174,096 | 2,339,124 | 13.4 |
| 13 | stern.de | 26.4% | 156,247 | 2,590,757 | 16.6 |
Ranked by distance to parity. Gendered words per article is how much of each site's text the count rests on.
Sport
Sport is the section that drags every site down. Across all German sport sections, 20.8% of the people are women, against 36.4% everywhere else.
| Site | Sport | Everything else | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| tagesspiegel.de | 16.9% | 37.3% | 20.4 |
| zeit.de | 28.1% | 42.4% | 14.3 |
| focus.de | 21.6% | 33.0% | 11.4 |
Sections whose name contains "sport", versus all other tracked sections of the same site.
Method
Every five minutes the tracker fetched the newly published articles on each site and counted, in the text, the female and male first names and the gendered pronouns and kin words (she, her, mother, sister; he, his, father, brother, and their equivalents in German). A name counts as female or male only if national name statistics put it above 95% for one gender; unisex names and unknown names are dropped. The share of women is women divided by women plus men, summed over the period, so a site that publishes more weighs more.
Sections come from the URL path. Author gender uses the byline's first name with the same 95% rule. None of this understands a text the way a person does: a woman named as a victim and a woman quoted as an expert count the same. The counts do agree closely with manual studies such as the Global Media Monitoring Project (Who Makes the News), which the tracker is independent of.
The Gender Equality Tracker is a Prognosis project, the Swedish data studio behind AO.news. For Germany the readings are preserved for 2016, and that is what this page reports; nothing outside it is estimated. Other countries: Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, United Kingdom. The same newsrooms are on AO.news every day: follow German breaking news as it is pushed.
Download the data
Every table on this page as one CSV, long format, under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0: reuse it, redraw it, credit Prognosis / AO.news and link back.
Download gender-equality-tracker-germany.csv →
Cite as: Prognosis / AO.news (2026). Gender Equality Tracker, Germany 2016 [Data set]. https://ao.news/gender-equality-tracker/germany