Considering that 20% of women and 2% of men report being raped in their lifetimes, these disparities represent a pretty glaring bias in sexual assault coverage. If male journalists are covering most of the stories about sexual assault and are failing to give the primary victims prominent voices, it's no wonder that the public discussion of rape is rife with victim-blaming tropes — like the idea that women "deserve" to be assaulted because of what they wore how much they had to drink , or because they had consensual sex with their attacker before the assault Of course, numbers don't always paint the full picture, and this report doesn't suggest that all male journalists are coming from a misogynistic perspective; there are plenty of men writing sensitive, informative articles about rape. And FWIW, these findings aren't out of sync with the proportion of female bylines on all news stories: Previous WMC research suggests that women make up a mere 37% of bylines. (Also problematic? Yes.)We've only recently begun to openly discuss rape as a society. If women aren't given platforms to discuss the very real dangers they face on a daily basis, it will be harder to get survivors, male or female, to come forward after attacks — and it will make it easier for attacks to occur in the first place.As Julie Burton, president of the WMC, puts it in the report: "This study is a chance for the U.S. media to take a hard look at where it stands on this kind of critical work and figure out how it plans to move forward in a more equitable way. Women who bravely come forward to report rape deserve media that represents their voices in equal measure to those of men."