Thirty-one days has April (or at least when you combine it with the end of March), so there are 31 days to assess in this month's count of gender balance on the Star Tribune's op-ed page, 2021. (If you'd like to compare to the previous months, here they are: Month 1/February and Month 2/March.)
- The cartoonists this month were 100% male. Not even Lisa Benson made it in this time. As I've said before, we love the house cartoonist Steve Sack, who makes up the lion's share of the material, but couldn't they balance a bit on the other days?
- There were 52 men writing this month, compared to 25 women, which makes the men 67.5% of the total... compared to 69% in February and 66.7% in January. They've clearly got their sweet spot right round two-thirds men.
- Women definitely did better among the local writers this month than last, with 46.3% of the bylines (compared to just 34% in March). Though two of them were conservative mouthpieces, which always irks me, since they're honorary men.
- This month we had two bylines with unidentifiable genders. One was for a piece by the editorial board of The Economist (I could hazard a guess, but I didn't, officially) and the other was a screed by a University of Minnesota Duluth frosh with the ambiguous name of Blaine, opining about how legalizing marijuana will turn us all into soma-drugged drones, a la Brave New World. It was a dismal piece but I have no idea what gender to assign to Blaine since my googling turned up no info on her/him/them.
I think I have one more month of counting in me to get to a third of a year at least.
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