Monday, May 24, 2021

Women and Men, Star Tribune Op-Eds, Month 4

Well, my count of the gender balance on the Star Tribune op-ed page has made it to a third of the year. I guess I'll have to go for half a year now. 

As in April, the cartoonists of May 2021 were 100% male. This is really starting to bug me. I understand that the in-house cartoonist Steve Sack is male, and Monday regular LK Hanson is male, but in the roughly one-quarter other cartoons they run... can they really not find any political cartoonists who are women? I won't say I'm missing Lisa Benson (that would be a stretch!) but really. Not one in two months?

The op-ed gender disparity was worse than ever. There were 59 written by men and 22 by women (that would be 73% men, 27% women). Oh, and one bylined by The Economist, which I didn't count. The local op-eds were — as usual — better balance, but this month not by much: only 30% were by women, compared to other months that have had percentages as high as 46%.

Yes, yes, I am going to have to chart this at some point, and that means I have to find my original data. It's kind of embarrassing that I don't know where it is right now. And I have to admit it's written on the backs of envelopes. Very official, this data collection.

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