How on Earth did The Washington Post get the women’s symbol wrong?

A Washington Post Express cover that uses the male symbol to illustrate a women’s rights march happening later this month in Washington, D.C., has left readers and the internet perplexed and outraged over the inane oversight.

The wrong version of the cover showing the male symbol — a circle with an arrow in the one o’clock position — made it to print Thursday morning, hours before its editors realized the mistake and issued an apology. Its Twitter account also followed it with the correct symbol for women, which is a circle with a cross in the six o’clock position.

Earlier in the day, the Express shared the image of its cover to promote the issue on Twitter with a caption that read, “Today’s cover: The Women’s March on Washington started on Facebook. Now it’s expected to be the largest rally linked to the inauguration.”

The publication scrubbed the image and the tweet from its social media accounts and posted its apology. But that didn’t seem to calm confused and upset readers who blasted the publication for its mistake, which some saw as evidence of the paper’s lack of diversity in the newsroom.

On Twitter when asked whether it would reprint the correct version of the cover on the next day’s edition, the Express said it would address the mistake and print a corrected image in Friday’s paper.

The Express’ mistake comes at a time when focus on the demographic makeup of newsrooms has sharpened and groups have called for news organizations to hire more women and people of color. A recent report by the Women’s Media Center revealed men held a plurality of top roles in newspapers.

Men comprise 60 percent of newspaper copy and layout editor roles while women only made up slightly more than 40 percent, according to the 2015 report. At the Washington Post, specifically, the ratio of bylines by women to men was 39 percent to 61 percent.

The Washington Post Express doesn’t appear to list its staff on its website but The Washingtonian, a competing publication, identifies its executive editor as Dan Caccavaro and its creative director as Jon Benedict, both men.

Update: Readers who got a copy of Friday’s edition noticed an “Editor’s Note” on the bottom right hand corner of the cover, which read: “We messed up our cover illustration in Thursday’s paper and we’re really embarrassed about it. We erroneously used a male symbol instead of a female symbol. Above is how the cover should have looked. We apologize for the mistake.”

What did you think of the Express cover and the mistake? Share your thoughts with me.

Email: luis.gomez@sduniontribune.com

Twitter: @RunGomez

UPDATES:

9:15 a.m.: This article was updated with a correction in the paper’s Friday edition.

This article was originally published January 5 at 11:15 a.m.