So if I ring a bloke who’s an expert on one thing or another, chances are he’s happy to chat to me (unless it’s 2am, he’s in Amsterdam and I’ve completely got my times wrong, which I regret to say has happened).

But it’s interesting to me the number of times I ring women who are the actual experts in their actual fields and the responses are pretty much identical. They go quiet and then they say: “I’m not the real expert in the field.” Or, “I can think of someone much better than me. I can give you his number.” His number.

Anne Maree Payne, my lovely colleague at the University of Technology Sydney, and I took a limited snapshot of Australian news media over the course of four weeks in October last year. We looked at the top five stories on each of 15 news sites over lunchtime. From that data set of 300 stories, we looked at the gender of the sources and the gender of the bylines.

I've had some grumpy calls from colleagues saying we picked a bad time for their publications – but we made it the same time frame for everyone. In our report, 2019 Women for Media: ‘You can’t be what you can’t see’, it’s clear that female journalists make more of an effort to get women’s voices into stories.

Women make up just 34 per cent of the sources used in these top stories. Men are quoted far more often in news stories than women are quoted – about two to one – and male journalists are much more likely to quote men than women. On some news sites, the proportion of women in our snapshot whose stories got top billing was as little as 14 per cent. Yes, yes, I hear you say, but it’s mostly sport that gets top billing; or it’s mostly politics. And that’s precisely why we need to have women everywhere doing everything.

A few years back, I decided that I wasn’t going to let women get away with avoidance. Mostly, these women decide they don't want to participate because they feel anxious about being exposed; fear they will say the wrong thing; worry they will make a fool of themselves.

And for some, there was a serious load of self-deprecation on top of all the self-doubt. I have made the choice as a journalist to try to coach women to speak despite the many, many, many excuses I’ve heard. Not good enough. Not smart enough. Not verbal enough. Not pretty enough. (This one is ridiculous. Have you seen the men who get away with being on the telly?)

And the advantage I’ve got now is that I’ve felt all those things myself, all those little negative messages which put obstacles in my way. Yep, I've heard it all before, and not just as a voice in my own head. Last year, I went on ABC’s The Drum for the first time. I’d been asked a couple of times and always said no. (And I can tell you that it’s pretty hard to say no to the folks who call you. They are extremely good at being polite yet getting their own way). And I went on and hated myself. But it got easier and I felt less like throwing up before going on, less inclined to look at iView obsessively for all my errors.

At the launch of our report, supported by the Trawalla Foundation, Virginia Haussegger, former ABC journalist and now head of 50/50 by 2030 Foundation, said she met senior women in the Australian public service who felt that same degree of dread.

Does this dread and avoidance really matter? Of course. Our society is 50/50 but our public voices are 65-35. Those public voices benefit from that status, reproduce that status and make it hard for girls, in particular, to see they have a place in the world where their views and expertise are valued.

Yes, it’s partly to do with which people are in top positions; and since nearly every single government minister is a man and nearly every single CEO of an ASX top-100 company is a man and nearly every single leader of top research groups is a man, you can see it’s hard to get women’s voices out there. But there are plenty of women in these fields whose voices should be heard and heard often.

So what responsibility do journalists have to try to get a range of sources? Some feel it more keenly than others. Our snapshot shows women try harder to speak to women but it also showed me something else.

As we were looking at opinion pieces in February, we noticed a marked difference between what women and men write about. Of the 103 opinion pieces about government and politics, 84 per cent were written by men.

Got a view? Men sure do. Me too – but it turns out to be about the kinds of things men never write about.

Jenna Price is an academic at the University of Technology Sydney.