By Maya Dusenbery • @mayadusenbery • 13 years ago

Chart of the Day: The obituary gender gap

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:
obituary gender gap

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.

St. Paul, MN

Maya Dusenbery is executive director in charge of editorial at Feministing. She is the author of the forthcoming book Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick (HarperOne, March 2018). She has been a fellow at Mother Jones magazine and a columnist at Pacific Standard magazine. Her work has appeared in publications like Cosmopolitan.com, TheAtlantic.com, Bitch Magazine, as well as the anthology The Feminist Utopia Project. Before become a full-time journalist, she worked at the National Institute for Reproductive Health. A Minnesota native, she received her B.A. from Carleton College in 2008. After living in Brooklyn, Oakland, and Atlanta, she is currently based in the Twin Cities.

Maya Dusenbery is an executive director of Feministing and author of the forthcoming book Doing Harm on sexism in medicine.

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