See this chart? This chart shows the gender gap between women and men with bylines and on-camera appearances. Women make up 36.1 percent according to Women’s Media Center.

Well, this comes as shock to me because my journalism classes appear to have a pretty even mix between men and women, some even have more women that men.

Does this give us reason to believe that these numbers will change as the next few journalism classes graduate and enter the field?  I can only hope so because I can’t speak for the demographics of other schools.

One number from the report really stood out to me: 31 percent. That’s the percentage of female-written articles per issue at The New York Times.

Before I continue, I should mention that I absolutely love The New York Times and its reporting. I aspire to be a journalist of that caliber one day.

But ouch. Will this newspaper, which essentially the Bible in so many of my classes,  give me and my female classmates the chance to show what we’ve got? Just throwing this out there: some of us are getting pretty good at what we do.

I think we will have chance. While numbers don’t lie, those numbers are not permanent and they are not ignored.

How do I know this? Just look at The Times itself. It’s executive editor Jill Abramson (the first woman to hold that position, mind you) told Women’s Media Center that more female staffers are needed pledged to make it a real thing. She said they are not short on female applications.

“During my tenure, half of the news masthead of the Times—traditionally the high-est ranking editors—are women. That’s a significant milestone,” Abramson told the Women’s Media Center.

We are continuously having to prove ourselves but, above all else, good work should not be overshadowed by gender. If we can do the work well, if not better than others, being a woman should not matter.

Of course I’m not happy that significant changes to the gender demographics of media are not changing very quickly, but we can’t deny that they are changing and starting to get more attention. I’m going to take it as a challenge to work hard and let that work speak for itself.