Analysis: New Yorker Cartoon Characters Are Largely Male And White

"He has some food issues." (PRNewsFoto/Bloomberg)
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A partially satirical journal recently analyzed every cartoon that the liberal New Yorker magazine published in 2014 and found that the characters in the cartoons were mostly white males.

The journal, Proceedings of the Natural Institute of Science, published its findings in a series of articles.

Matt J. Michel, one of the authors, analyzed the ethnicity and sex of the characters depicted in each cartoon.

When there was a question about a character’s race, Michel classified the character as non-white, thus erring on the side of minorities. Despite this potential padding, minorities were under-represented in the magazine’s cartoons: out of 1,810 characters, 1,714 (94.7 percent) were white.

The same pattern was seen with gender. Out of the 1,810 characters shown in the cartoons, 1,277 (approximately 70.6 percent) were male.

The analysis also revealed that female cartoonists were much more likely than their male counterparts to draw female characters. Of the characters that were drawn by women, 46.9 percent were female, while men drew 26.6 percent female characters.

Women were also generally depicted as wives, mothers and assistants.

h/t Vox

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