Last year, just 23 percent of the notable deaths reported by the top newspapers in the US were women. Here’s the breakdown by paper from Mother Jones:
Obit editors claim the gap will shrink in the future–since women have more opportunities to be “movers and shakers” these days. But, as Gloria Steinem says, it’s also about the kinds of the accomplishments we value. “Women are more likely to be credited with the personal than the political—and also put in one silo. Anything that only affects women is taken less seriously than anything that also affects men.” And Lesley Kinzel points out that’s a rather convenient way of letting editors off the hook for not finding the “women who maybe didn’t get the attention they deserved.”
Check out the rest of MoJo’s charts.
One Comment
What should the obit editors do? If five men and five women in their town die tomorrow, but the only two with any notable achievements are both men, how should the editor allocate space and coverage? Should they reduce the size of one of the men’s obits and increase the size of the obit of a random woman?
How are they meant to “find” women who “didn’t get the attention they deserve”? Are they supposed to lavish column space on a woman with personal accomplishments (raising kids, canning her own vegetables, part-time job at a local store, volunteer work) that nobody outside of her family is interested in reading about? Or is the obit editor supposed to downplay the accomplishments of men (he was a prosecutor, judge, and congressman, but we don’t have space to tell you about all that, we need the column space for a waitress who happened to die the same day).
If you want to see more obituary page coverage of notable women, start by making sure there are more notable women on the front, international, and business pages.