Journalism, like many others, is a field dominated by men, and while there are more and more female journalists, it is still far from equal. In 2020, the Global Media Monitoring Project found that it would take 67 years to close the gender gap.

According to a report from 2024, men account for 80% of expert opinions and 70% of opinion bylines. This is why it’s crucial to learn about women who have had a huge impact on the field. Here are five prominent female journalists who contributed to the news industry starting in the 19th century, listed chronologically.

Margaret Fuller

Born in 1810 in Massachusetts, she was a woman of “many firsts” – the first woman to be allowed access to the library at Harvard; the author of the first major feminist work, Women in the Nineteenth Century; and the first female war correspondent.

Fuller received a classical education – rarely available for women at the time – from her father. She became interested in transcendentalism and was made the editor of The Dial, a transcendental journal for literature, philosophy and religion, and advocated for the philosophy of liberation – for women included.

Ida B. Wells-Barnett

Born into slavery in Mississippi in 1862, African-American journalist Wells-Barnett devoted herself to battling racism, sexism and violence while writing during the suffragette movement.

Losing her parents and infant brother to yellow fever meant she had to raise her other siblings on her own, so she became an educator to earn their living.

Dorothy Thompson

Born in 1893, New Yorker Dorothy Thompson reported in the 1930-40s and is known for her efforts to warn people about Hitler and the Nazis. In 1939, Time magazine described her as one of the “most influential women in America”.

Until 1920, when the 19th Amendment was ratified, granting women the right to vote, she was involved in the suffragette movement. Following this, she decided to be a journalist and headed for Europe to look for a good story, becoming a correspondent for the Philadelphia Public Ledger.

Her articles discussing international news were so incisive that in 1931 the National Socialist German Workers’ (Nazi) Party invited her to interview their infamous leader. Extending the interview, she published a book,  I Saw Hitler! (1933).

Back in the US, Thompson started a column called ‘On the Record’, which ran in 170 newspapers, as a crusade against Nazism. One of her most life-threatening stands against Hitler was when she attended a 1939 rally of 20,000 Nazi-sympathisers at Madison Square Garden, where she loudly criticised the speaker.

Her biographer, Peter Kurth, described as the “first woman to head a foreign news bureau of any importance”.

She died in 1961 after a heart attack.

Edythe Eyde

Eyde – usually known by her pen name Lisa Ben (an anagram of the word lesbian) – published the first lesbian magazine in the US, in 1947, at the age of 26. The monthly magazine, called Vice Versa, had nine editions, but continued to circulate for a few years after it ended, as it was the first time many people saw information about lesbians.

She named the magazine Vice Versa to show her rejection of society’s ideas about the LGBTQ+ community. In Edye’s words, “in those days our kind of life was considered a vice […] and vice versa means the opposite. I thought it was very apropos.”

In the 1950s, she started writing for the magazine The Ladder, published by the lesbian organisation Daughters of Bilitis. This is when she chose the pen name ‘Lisa Ben’ after her original choice of ‘Ima Spinster’ (which sounds like ‘I’m a spinster’) was rejected by her editors.

In 2010, the Association for LGBTQ+ Journalists welcomed her into the Hall of Fame. She died five years later.

Anna Politovskaya

Born in 1958 and assassinated in 2006, Anna Politovskaya was a Russian investigative journalist best known for her criticism of the Russian government under Vladimir Putin and, in particular, her reporting on the Second Chechen War in the late 1990s.