How Biased Am I?

I decided to put myself to a little test. I was inspired by Jennifer Dalton’s artsy media analysis profiled on Jezebel. She does some neat visual stuff with the gender breakdowns of talk show guests. For example, she calculated that in 2010, 79% of The Daily Show‘s guests were men. Colbert was even worse, at 82%. Rachel Maddow herself hosted 80% male guests. Yowza.

To be fair, those three shows are politically themed, and is it their fault if politicians are overwhelmingly male? I’d argue that the pundits are reflecting the inequality of the pool, not necessarily promoting the gender gap. We could dig further and ask what percentage of male congressmen have been featured on these shows versus the percentage of female congresswomen. The issue is, there are so few female congresswomen that I doubt we’d even get a viable statistical sample! I’d like Dalton to blow it out further and and see how many of the female guests on Stewart and Colbert were actresses promoting movies vs. substantive players on the national or international scene.

Annnnnywaaay, here’s what I thought I’d do. I have a category over the right sidebar called “Really Good Writing by Other People”. This is what I use when the point of my lazy post is to say, “Go here, read this.” In some capacity, by assigning a writer or blogger that label, I’m doling out Emily-influence points. So… the question is, who is getting Emily points?

I dug through the last 3 months of posts that warranted the RGWBOP label and tallied the gender of the authors to whom I was directing traffic. In some cases, one post included more than one author, so those counted separately. Only one was listed twice (Kate Fridkis at Eat the Damn Cake). There were 56 writers, including a double count for Kate. Here’s the breakdown:

Actually more even than I would have thought, given the Rosie the Riveter icon on the banner….

Related Post: This type of analysis is how this whole blog thing got started, remember?

Related Post: Vanity Fair’s big earners list reflects some craaaazy skewed influence.