8 ms·
Listen to Her: Gender on This American Life (2017)
- mcguire 8y agoThere is something weird about the percentage dialog - contributors graph. The line doesn't look like it goes through the points.
- itronitron 8y agoyeah, that one seems off, and the interviewees one looks like a regression line should be flatter
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- spacehome 8y ago> To figure out how much airtime is divided between men and women, we pulled the show's transcripts and categorized the gender of every person who speaks. It sounds difficult to figure out the gender of the speakers from their voice. They probably made some assumptions.
- bitcurious 8y agoTranscripts are annotated text documents usually written by professional staff. An example: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/474/transcript https://www.thisamericanlife.org/474/transcript
- spacehome 8y agoThis helps how?
- bitcurious 8y agoReally? You can't imagine how knowing who is speaking would help identify the gender of who is speaking?
- rectang 8y agoThat could be -- there are more people whose genders are not as they seem than most realize. But they're surely not going on voice alone but also name, in-person impression based on appearance and so on. I once made a gender survey of several hundred people going by names, falling back to pictures in LinkedIn profiles, falling back to pronouns in forum posts referring to the person in question by people who ought to know. I assume the results were not perfect -- but they were probably good enough to be useful. (The result was 95+% male, which was enough to prove a point.)
- spacehome 8y ago"Any sufficiently advanced sarcasm is indistinguishable from sincerity." I'm gonna have to start adding sarcasm tags.
- mirimir 8y agoThey didn't just rely on voice. They assigned gender based on names. And names for those with various sexuality and gender transformations can be ambiguous. Maybe male vs female is just too limiting a distinction.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- xapata 8y ago>> transcripts > voice Transcripts have written names, which can help. It also seems they used written words and not spoken words.
- rossdavidh 8y agoSo, this is a fascinating article and I greatly appreciate the time that went into it. I also appreciate that Ira Glass was not immediately defensive about it, and seems to have cooperated with it to at least some degree. But... isn't the most obvious answer, that it's male dominated because the Boss is a male? I'm not saying that I have proof of this being the case, but it seems like an obvious hypothesis to check out. Too simple? Or are there no comparable shows where a woman is the Top Boss, to compare to?
- itronitron 8y agothey could do a comparison with Fresh Air, hosted by Terry Gross on NPR
- spacehome 8y agoIt's not really the same kind of show. Fresh Air mostly consists of Gross interviewing a single interviewee.
- rossdavidh 8y agoTrue, but over many years. It would be interesting to see if the pattern is different (or maybe even more interesting if the pattern is the same).
- alexandercrohde 8y agoMeh, I don't know what to make of this. I don't think equal proportion of gender talking is a meaningful goal, and the more I think about it the less sense it makes to me. I think about it and start to ask should all shows need to be gender-balanced? Should then The View need to be 50% male? Oprah? Should we strive for an equal proportion of races in all shows? What about non-Americans, should they be represented proportionally?
- rectang 8y agoI think the best way to answer this question is to listen to what those who are currently underrepresented have to say about it.
- reversecs 8y agoWhat do they say about that
- alexandercrohde 8y agoI don't understand. Do you mean "listen to" as in "hear the opinion of" or as in "obey"?
- loco5niner 8y ago"hear the opinion of" would be the normal interpretation (US English), especially when "listen to" is followed by "what [they] have to say about it". I struggle to understand in what context "obey" would make sense.
- Glyptodon 8y ago"listen to" is commonly used as a form of follow/obey in vernacular English. "Listen to Bob, he knows what he is doing." At minimum it frequently connotes more than just listening.
- 8y ago
- furbyhat 8y agoThis stuff is getting real tiresome. How about we do a histogram of the genders in Nursing, teaching vs coal mining, military and then act all smug like we uncovered something meaningful
- awakeasleep 8y agoI consider myself a feminist and progressive, but utterances like this sort of test my wokeness and make me feel weary. >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. It's disturbing that your female staff doesn't produce content in the way you want? What am I supposed to take away from this?
- rectang 8y agoAs an ally, I think this post is pretty interesting in terms of the efficacy of programs which increase inclusion and their projected impact along a variety of metrics. I despair at having a decent conversation about it on HN, though. :(
- DoreenMichele 8y agoI'm a woman. FWIW, when I have been on email lists where the population was mostly female, men still dominated the conversation. The dirty little secret is that an awful lot of women reinforce the male dominant status quo. Women often aligned themselves with the dominant male voice on the list and gave anyone hell who dared stand up to him. This often meant I was a target of such behavior.
- rectang 8y agoSo, the data from the story and your both hypothesis suggest that parity in representation alone won't in and of itself result in parity along other axes, like proportion of airtime. And thus, other initiatives would be required to move the needle on those other axes. This comports with what we already know about the importance of female role models.
- DoreenMichele 8y agoI don't think role models are enough. I think women need stronger rights. I'm not sure what that would look like. But I think there is a power issue here with very deep roots, such deep roots that merely letting women get paid jobs doesn't fix it per se. I'm frankly tired of my incredibly broken life. I'm feeling like all this shit is just unfixable.
- spacehome 8y agoI question the unspoken assumption that there should be an equitable split of male and female voices on the program. An alternative hypothesis is that the most interesting people skew male, or at least the ones willing to talk into a microphone. You have to at least consider this hypothesis before jumping to the conclusion of bias in the reporting.
- rectang 8y agoIt seems like you're using "interesting" as an absolute metric, which I think is highly dubious for an aesthetic quality. Another explanation is that interviewing people in positions of authority is unavoidable and those people are disproportionately male at present. But the point of this article is that they looked at the data and it didn't reveal what they expected.
- spacehome 8y agoI didn't really mean to use the word that way. I mean more in the sense of "serving This American Life's storytelling goals". The best of their programs are very thought-provoking, and I'll end up thinking about them long after the show is over. I don't think I could articulate what TAL's goals are exactly, but I do find some of them "interesting", and that's what I hope for when I tune in. I meant the word to encompass a lot of different qualities. For instance if a story is told better with a first hand account of an authority, then that authority is of interest to the story, and hence that authority is interesting (as he or she relates to the story).
- rule_follower 8y agoIsn't it one of the great assumptions of our age that everyone is "equal" and ought be proportionally represented in every endeavor? And that inequitable representation is evidence of a moral or actual crime against the under represented? (At least in cases when an official oppressor class is over represented and an official victim class is under represented. And also when participating in the endeavor is desirable.)
- 8y ago
- scubaguy 8y agoIt's really great that they released the code used for the research, though without the actual transcripts, e.g., dialogueByAct.tsv, it's hard to fully reproduce their findings.