That women made up only 18.546% of the guests. 18.546%. Now, off the airwaves, in the US,
women are said to make up 50.1% of the population. To pretend that they were represented on Fresh Air requires a lot of stupid or a lot of drugs. Possibly, Terry Gross could provide you with both.
We're now studying The Diane Rehm Show and already found dismaying results, as noted in "Diane Rehm's gender imbalance (Ann, Ava and C.I.)." The examination found that, for April, only 34.48% of her guests (only 34%) were women.
The month of May still has two days in it. Monday, May 30th, Diane intends to rebroadcast (one man, one woman -- the woman is the second hour and is Carly Simon, an interview worth listening to). Tuesday she has five guests scheduled for the first hout (US House Rep Michael Burgess, Norman Ornstein, Ron Pollack, Julie Rovner and Joy Johnson Wilson) and one guest for the second hour (Anthony Facui). Should that schedule change, we'll change our figures in the next installment and note that the scheduled line up changed. (If there's no change, we'll note that next time as well, just so we're all on the same page.)
But using the data for Monday and Tuesday, we're left with a total of 118 guests.
For those with poor math skills, 59 guests would have to be women for an equal number of women to have been booked. But 59 weren't women. You want to guess how many were women?
Thirty-two were women, eight-six guests were men. Which breaks down to, for the month of May, 27.11% of her guests were female. From the embarrassing 34% of April, Diane Rehm managed to actually drop lower, to 27%.
Some might think Diane doesn't notice this. Really? When twice this month she did an entire two hour broadcast with not one female guest, you think she couldn't notice that? Do you also think she doesn't notice that her show doesn't book women for 'hard news'? Especially when the panel is discussing debt or science, Diane can provide three and five guests but she and her producers really seem to struggle to find a woman to include.
Time and again, Diane sends the message that women are good as artists (Carly Simon) and as readers (book discussions) but they're not good at the sciences. And even when she allows that women are good as artists and readers, please note men fair much better there and that book discussions are usually about books written by men.
If NPR applied Diane or Terry Gross' percentages to hosts, a good number of on air women would be on the unemployment line. Time and again, NPR seems to intentionally broadcast this message from their female staff: I got mine.
That's neither fair nor reflective. We won't hold our breath waiting for NPR's ombudsperson to tackle the issue. When we did our year-long study of Fresh Air, the ombudsperson was "curious" and "interested" but apparently still falling back on her (false) claim that she can't comment on Fresh Air because it's not an NPR show. Of course, NPR broadcasts the show. Of course, NPR holds the copyrights to the show. In fact, that detail alone makes it legally an NPR show but legalities aren't taught in J-school. Equally true is that she has commented on Fresh Air several times before including when Terry felt the need to use the n-word on air. So it's really just that Alicia Shephard doesn't comment on Fresh Air unless she wants to. The Diane Rehm Show, as we have noted before, is regularly identified as an NPR show by the press. (The New York Times among them.) No requests for correction come in on that.
With the exception of Monday and Tuesday's guests, you can find tallies in the posts below (from Ann's site):
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