The short answer
36.7% of the people in British news are women. Counted across 25,473,676 names and pronouns in 914,425 articles from the biggest news sites in the United Kingdom in 2016. That is 1.7 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 the United Kingdom are preserved: 93,702 readings, 914,425 articles. Every number here comes from counting, not from a survey. Software read each newly published article on British 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. dailystar.co.uk is closest at 50.9% women; ft.com furthest at 28.3%.
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 | dailystar.co.uk | 50.9% | 92,092 | 2,939,560 | 31.9 |
| 2 | express.co.uk | 40.0% | 94,671 | 3,513,342 | 37.1 |
| 3 | buzzfeed.com | 38.3% | 33,344 | 396,176 | 11.9 |
| 4 | mirror.co.uk | 37.0% | 196,193 | 8,181,064 | 41.7 |
| 5 | thetimes.co.uk | 34.5% | 62,243 | 898,973 | 14.4 |
| 6 | theguardian.com | 32.7% | 125,902 | 2,029,595 | 16.1 |
| 7 | independent.co.uk | 31.9% | 55,838 | 1,509,676 | 27.0 |
| 8 | dailyrecord.co.uk | 31.1% | 61,082 | 2,097,715 | 34.3 |
| 9 | bbc.com/news | 30.7% | 11,726 | 114,326 | 9.7 |
| 10 | telegraph.co.uk | 30.3% | 104,772 | 2,623,080 | 25.0 |
| 11 | standard.co.uk | 28.8% | 41,217 | 968,902 | 23.5 |
| 12 | ft.com | 28.3% | 35,345 | 201,267 | 5.7 |
Ranked by distance to parity. Gendered words per article is how much of each site's text the count rests on.
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 English). 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.
Excluded: dailymail.co.uk (503 gendered words per article, against 15–40 on every other site; it would have shown 58.6% women). A rate like that means the scraper was counting page furniture, such as sidebars, comment threads and "most read" rails, rather than the article, so the site is left out of every figure above. It is still in the CSV.
The Gender Equality Tracker is a Prognosis project, the Swedish data studio behind AO.news. For the United Kingdom the readings are preserved for 2016, and that is what this page reports; nothing outside it is estimated. Other countries: Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Germany. The same newsrooms are on AO.news every day: follow British 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-uk.csv →
Cite as: Prognosis / AO.news (2026). Gender Equality Tracker, United Kingdom 2016 [Data set]. https://ao.news/gender-equality-tracker/uk