This week has seen the BBC Radio 4's flagship political show - the Today programme - come under fire for apparently being too dominated by men.

On Monday the Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries (Ed Vaizey MP) told the House of Commons that "some 84% of reporters and guests on Radio 4’s “Today” programme are men."

The show was also under the microscope for the sparcity of female guests during a Newsnight debate on Wednesday, where Conservative MP Louise Mensch complained to Jeremy Paxman about the poor representation of women among Today programme guests.

The Daily Telegraph also picked up on the story, claiming that the figures came from the group Sound Women, who were also cited in the Mr Vaizey's remarks to the House of Commons. Keen to learn more, we went in search of the statistics.

The figure actually comes from research done by the Guardian in June 2011 and published in December, which found that excluding the main presenters, 83.5 per cent of contributors to the Today programme over a four week period were male, and 16.5 per cent were female.

As well as monitoring the presence of women contributors on the Today programme, the Guardian also measures the gender imbalance in the print media, by looking at bylines of national newspapers, counted every Monday to Friday over the four weeks. The figures reveal that during this period the Daily Mail had the highest proportion of bylines by female journalists, while the Independent had the lowest proportion.

The Guardian acknowledge that “this wasn't a scientific study”, and unfortunately the raw data is unavailable on their website. We don't know, for example, if the results would have been different if the tests were conducted over the course of the year.

So while the claims of Mr Viazey and others do accurately reflect the limited research that has been done on the topic, it would be interesting to see if the findings were borne out in a wider study of women's representation in the political media.