Listen to Her: Gender on This American Life (2017)

I consider myself a feminist and progressive, but utterances like this sort of test my wokeness and make me feel weary.<p>&gt;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.<p>It&#x27;s disturbing that your female staff doesn&#x27;t produce content in the way you want? What am I supposed to take away from this?

I 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.

Meh, I don&#x27;t know what to make of this. I don&#x27;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.<p>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?

So, 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&#x27;t the most obvious answer, that it&#x27;s male dominated because the Boss is a male? I&#x27;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?

There is something weird about the percentage dialog - contributors graph. The line doesn&#x27;t look like it goes through the points.

&gt; To figure out how much airtime is divided between men and women, we pulled the show&#x27;s transcripts and categorized the gender of every person who speaks.<p>It sounds difficult to figure out the gender of the speakers from their voice. They probably made some assumptions.