Project Name: Bylines
URL: bylines.today
Team Members: Doremy Diatta, Sharanya Durvusula, Melanie Hoff, Kira Simon-Kennedy

Bylines is a browser extension that draws attention to the under-representation of women journalists in major publications by pulling up a mock “paywall” after reading 10 articles in a row written by men. This paywall will present the reader with three options:
1) donate to a nonprofit supporting women of color in journalism
2) hide all articles by men for the rest of the day
3) share a notice on social media about the dire gender balance in their daily news consumption.

Despite the fact that most graduates of journalism programs are women, newsrooms remain only one third staffed by women.

We determine an author’s gender by referencing a database that the four of us have manually populated with author names, the publications they write for, and the gender they choose to represent themselves as. If the author isn’t in our database, we refer to gender-api.com which is designed to accommodate international names. Our margin of error takes into account that gender is a fluid, non-binary social construct, and that the API cannot account for transgender individuals or gender-neutral names the way our manually entered database can. Bylines will also feature a “Report an Algorithmic Misgendering” button prominently.