Study: Huffington Post Favors Male Bloggers

You might expect that someone like Arianna Huffington, who has incorporated female empowerment as a big part of her shtick (at least since the days when she made her name as an anti-feminist author) would make sure that men don't dominate the discourse on her top-ranking website.

But no. A study for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, conducted by former Huffington Post staffer Jessica Wakeman, shows otherwise. (Disclosure: Wakeman is a former colleague of mine.) The study looked at which of the site's hundreds of daily posts were selected for the 13 featured spots on the homepage that receive the most viewership over a two-month period from early July to early September. Of the 1,125 posts featured during that span, only 23 percent were written by women.

But here's the best part: Of those 255 woman-authored posts, 57 were by Huffington herself. Take those away and fewer than 19 percent of the featured posts on Huffpo were by women.

Wakeman concluded that Huffpo's editorial gender skew is roughly on a par with the opinion sections of publications such as Newsweek, The New York Times.