![]() Miscellaneous lines account for 0.09% of all of the words spoken and were omitted from the analysis. Spoken lines were categorized into male, female, and a third miscellaneous category encompassing group lines and unintelligible lines. This analysis is based on the 622 episodes aired as of August 2017, not including #374 because its transcript was unavailable. You can also find the code used in our analysis on GithubĪs we continue working toward gender equality and tracking progress, it’s clear we still have room to improve so that one day, we hear women's thoughts, experiences, and ideas as often as we hear men's. This data is easily accessible in this Google Sheet. There’s also episode and act metadata, which includes year, title, description, and tags. To that end, we’ve open-sourced the data used in this analysis, which includes all the people who’ve appeared on the radio program and the number of words they've said in each episode. Further research is necessary regarding the pipeline of men and women producers and contributors, the diversity of producers’ contact networks, and the gender dynamics at play when pitching a story or being interviewed. Using this data alone, it's hard to say exactly why contributors or interviewees are more frequently men. Curiously, the percentage of airtime held by female interviewees has not followed that upward trend and instead has remained stagnant. This improvement is largely because women contributors as a group have been given more airtime. Note that Ira Glass's lines have again been omitted to avoid confounding the total word counts and contributor word counts. I shared the findings with the staff and we were not exactly sure what to do with it. There's no reason for there to be more men than women.” He added, “The fact that our mostly female staff and I have created a show where most of the voices are men is interesting and, frankly, disturbing. Glass found the results sobering, “We’re doing feature stories on just about anything that can happen anywhere, stories that are very personal. Yet in this case, there have been five episodes devoted to Father's Day and only one episode devoted to Mother's Day. Any episodes with male-specific themes, such as #187: Father's Day '01, would be balanced with episodes focusing on themes specific to women. For example, episodes with gender-neutral themes, such as #150: Kids as Adults, would include an equal balance of men and women contributors and guests. In a show granting equal speaking time to men and women, we would expect to see episodes cluster toward the middle of the chart. (We've excluded Ira Glass's lines as the host, he speaks in nearly every episode, and including his lines would only skew the results more male.) And 70% of the episodes have men speaking more than half the time. Men account for nearly two-thirds of the words spoken over the history of the show. Today on The Pudding, we analyze those 22 years of This American Life transcripts to try to answer these questions, and we speak with the host and executive producer, Ira Glass, about the results. Yet, an analysis of the show’s transcripts still yields the same pattern: men receive more airtime than women. ![]() While the causes of gender disparity in media are without a doubt complex, the gender gap behind the scenes is the most obvious factor.įor 22 years, the radio program This American Life has historically had a majority women staff in an otherwise male-dominated radio industry. The prevailing theory is that more stories written by women would feature a greater quantity and more nuanced portrayals of women. In most cases, the shortfall in equal representation is attributed to a lack of women behind the scenes. Over the past year, The Pudding has researched the gender gap in media (e.g., publishing, comics, and film). Today, we analyze the gender breakdown of airtime on This American Life. Each week on our site, we document a cultural phenomenon using data and visuals. You're reading “Listen to Her” from The Pudding.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |