This time, I fared slightly worse.

Last year, Matias wrote a bit of software that scraped all of my articles published by The Atlantic in 2015 and identified proper names as male or female. We then manually combed through the list and cleaned up the data: omitting some names that didn’t need to be counted (like Loch Ness, for instance) and assigning gender in cases where the computer didn’t know what to pick.

We included 192 of the articles I wrote for The Atlantic last year. All in all, I mentioned 736 different people and only 165 of them were women—meaning women accounted for just over 22 percent of the unique individuals I named or quoted in my work last year. (If you look at total mentions instead of unique mentions, it’s even worse. Out of the 2,301 names that appeared in my work last year, 1,839 of them were men. That leaves just 428 mentions of women: under 19 percent of total mentions. This suggests, and we were later able to confirm, that even when I do mention women, I give men more space in my stories.)

A couple of caveats: One difference between this year’s analysis and the one we did in 2013 is that we included fictional characters in the overall count. There weren’t too many of these, but enough that it merits mention. (For instance, Luke Skywalker, Batman, Voldemort, Mario, Phoebe Buffay, Chandler Bing, Goldie Wilson, and Marty McFly all got counted.)

Also, because the vast majority of the people I quoted or named only showed up in one story, it was hard to identify clear patterns at first. To solve this problem, Matias did a simple logarithmic transformation so we could better understand how women were represented among names that appeared in multiple articles. You can see how doing so transforms the visualization of our findings below:

Nathan Matias

Nathan Matias

Turns out I didn’t mention any of the same women in more than two articles last year, whereas some of the same men were mentioned in as many as six stories.

These numbers are distressing, particularly because my beats cover areas where women are already outnumbered by men—robotics, artificial intelligence, archaeology, astronomy, etc. Which means that, by failing to quote or mention very many women, I’m one of the forces actively contributing to a world in which women’s skills and accomplishments are undermined or ignored, and women are excluded. (Assessing my work for racial diversity would be more complex, but, I suspect, similarly revealing and disheartening.)

Some people would argue that I’m simply reflecting reality in my work. That’s an overly generous interpretation. Another popular reaction is that my job as a journalist isn’t to actively seek out diverse sources, but to find the most qualified people to help me tell the best possible story. I only agree with that in part: Yes, my job is to serve readers by finding the best sources for my stories, but why assume that the best source isn’t a woman? By substantially underrepresenting an entire gender, I’m missing out on all kinds of viewpoints, ideas, and experiences that might otherwise sharpen and enhance my reporting.