Sunday, February 19, 2012

Equality doesn't equal 34% (Ann, Ava and C.I.)

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The Diane Rehm Show is a public radio program which airs five times a week, for two hours each day. (A weekend 'best of' also airs on many NPR stations.) Rehm is the host and has been for many decades now. You might expect a public radio program hosted by a woman to be friendly to book an equal number of men and women as guests but if there's one thing we've learned about NPR, it's that gender imbalance may be more common on public airwaves than pledge drives. For example, in 2010 women made up only 18.546% of the guests of Terry Gross' guests on Fresh Air. Or take what happens when the CPB funds a music radio progam to correct 'diversity' issues, and ends up with a radio program which considers 14 women in five hours of commercial free, non-stop record spinning radio programming.


We've surveyed Diane's program for ten months (April 2011 through January 2012). During this time, she's had 1533 guests on her program. How many of those guests were women?

As we've pointed out before, in the United States women are said to make up 50.1% of the population. So half the country is women. This should mean that half of Diane's guests were women.

But that's not the case. Over ten months, only 34% (33.9%) of Diane's guests have been women.

So although women make up half the country's population, they make up only 34% of Diane's guests.

How does that happen?

This is on NPR which is funded with taxpayer dollars and listener contributions and was created with a mandate for diversity. So how is that women are repeatedly so underrepresented on the airwaves?

And how does a host of program pretend she doesn't notice the imbalance?

Especially when there have been whole two hour broadcasts where every guest was a man. You'd think a host would notice that.

And you'd think a host that didn't register that she was speaking to only men was a host that might need to consider packing it in.


For previous hard numbers, see "Diane Rehm manages to book even fewer women (Ann, Ava and C.I.) " and "Diane Rehm's gender imbalance (Ann, Ava and C.I.)" as well as the numbers below -- covering June 2011 through the end of January 2012 -- which should add up to 335 women and 625 men (thank you to Jim who did the math on this piece to help out):



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