When Women Make Headlines

Shown here are the 1,231 unique words most frequently used by Indian, South African, British, and American publishers in headlines that report about women. These words are arranged here in a decreasing order of their frequency.

The same word appears at different ranks in different countries. For example, US headlines use the word sue significantly more than those from India, South Africa, or the UK, where suing may be a less common practice. “Suing” someone in an American court can also gain international attention, like when two women sued Jeffrey Epstein’s estate over alleged sexual abuse and when Rihanna sued her father for “exploiting her name.”

In our dataset, the word Black most often appeared in headlines speaking about Black women. Black women may be part of a marginalized group in the US, the UK, and South Africa, but they appear quite frequently in the news in these countries nonetheless. South Africa, a nation still recovering from the impact of apartheid, is reporting about their prominent black female doctors, pioneering black female PhD candidates.

In India, the racial divide is not as likely to make headlines as the religious one. Muslim appears more frequently in Indian headlines, compared to the UK, the US, and South Africa, as local news in India often reports the religion of the story’s subject. As in the case of Black women, nearly any event that hurts the Muslim women’s community, like acts of violence, or helps them, like Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar becoming the first Mulsim women in Congress, makes headlines.

Speaking of firsts, the first similarity we noticed between all the countries is the high frequency of the word first. There are thousands of mentions, nearly 8,000 to be precise, of trailblazing women that shattered glass ceilings. In the recent past, outside Kamala Harris’ widely covered ascension to vice-presidency, Zuzana Čaputová became Slovakia’s first female President, and Ana Brnabić became Serbia’s first gay and first female prime minister.

Flip a page or scroll a little more and you will see women from different races, ethnicities, and identities, becoming the first to lead a US Marine Corps tank platoon, win an individual Olympic medal as an African-american female swimmer, fly an F-35 fighter jet, drive cars in a country where it was once forbidden and most of all, raise their voices.

In spite of these many firsts, the biggest similarity across headlines from the four countries is that the most mentioned word is “man.”

Man appears more than 30,000 times.

To gather more insight into the words used to report women-centered news, we categorized them into different themes (more on this in the method section). The first theme we noticed is crime & violence.

There are nearly 4,000 mentions of “death,” 6,000 mentions of rape, and more than 10,000 mentions of killing. Although there are stories where women perpetuate crime, the majority of these mentions are found in headlines where women are subjected to violence. When reporting these stories, many headlines refer to a woman in their capacity as a daughter, mother or wife.

This brings us to another prevalent theme in the set of words: gendered language. Many women-centered headlines use words that are explicitly gendered, such as “mother,” “waitress” or “policewoman”, or words that become associated with a particular sex or social gender because of underlying stereotypes, such as “sexy” or “beautiful.”

For example, we found words associated with gender stereotypes, like body, child, and marry repeatedly becoming the topics of conversation in women-centered headlines.

In analyzing this data, we also noticed many stories of women reclaiming their positions within headlines and refusing to remain in the margins. Stories of women, from Black, Dalit or LGBTQIA2S+ communities, leading this reclamation in Parliaments, Congresses, High Courts, cities and capitals pushed us to identify three more themes in addition to crime & violence and gendered language: empowerement, people & places and, race, ethnicity, & identity.

This process of reclaiming space has also led to the reclamation of some words that once belonged in a certain theme but do not anymore. For instance, while “slay-queen” is often used in a derogatory manner by men to describe women who like to show off a luxurious lifestyle, the word “slay” has also been reclaimed by these same women as a means to describe their successes as they “slay” it.

Many such words, like “hope,” “first” or “stand,” fought off attempts to be boxed into themes and chose to remain in the gray area. Hover over the colored blocks or search below to explore the words and themes on your own and drop us a note if you think you found another theme.

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Finally, insights can be generated by comparing frequencies between themes. Here, each word is as high as the number of times it is used, and stacked upon other words in the same theme. As it turns out, for every occurrence of an empowering word, we read two words of crime and violence.