Gender Representation in Comic Books

For one of my classes, I have spent this semester cleaning and analyzing data from the Grand Comics Database (GCD) with an eye towards assessing gender representation in English-language superhero comics.

Starting with GCD’s records of over 1.5 million comics from around the world, I identified the 66,000 individual comic book titles that fit my criteria. For each character appearing in those comics, I hand coded the gender for those with a self-identified male or female gender.

From this, I built a bipartite network – comic books on one side and comic book characters on the other. A comic and a character are linked if a character appeared in a comic. The resulting network has around 66,000 comic titles, 10,000 characters, and a total of nearly 300,000 links between the two sides.

From the bipartite network, I examined the projections on to each type of node. For example, the below visualization contains only characters, linking two characters if they appeared in the same issue. Nodes here are colored by publisher:

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The character network is heavily biased towards men; nearly 75% of the characters are male. Since the dataset includes comics from the 1930s to the present, this imbalance can be better assessed over time. Using the publication year of each comic, we can look at what percentage of all characters in a given year were male or female:

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While comics were very gender-skewed through the 1970s, in recent years, the balance has gotten a little better, though male character still dominate. If anyone knows what spiked the number of female characters in the early 2000s, please let know. I looked at a couple of things, but couldn’t identify the driving force behind that shift. It’s possible it just represents some inaccuracies in the original data set.

If you prefer, we can also look at the various eras of comics books to see how gender representation changed over time:

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I was particularly interested in applying a rudimentary version of the Bechdel test to this dataset. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the data to apply the full test, which asks whether two women (i) appear in the same scene, and (ii) talk to each other about (iii) something other than a man. But I could look at raw character counts for the titles in my dataset:

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I then looked at additional attributes of of those titles which pass the Bechdel test. For example, when were they published? Below are two different ways of bucketing the publication years: first by accepted comic book eras and the second by uniform time blocks. Both approaches show that having two female characters in comic books started out rare but has become more common, coinciding roughly with the overall growth of female representation in comic books.

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Finally, I could also look at the publishers of these comic books. My own biases gave me a suspicion of what I might find, but rationally I wasn’t at all sure what to expect. But now you can see, Marvel published an overwhelming number of the “Bechdel passed” comics in my dataset.

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To be fair, this graphic doesn’t account for anything more general about Marvel’s publishing habits. Marvel is known for it’s ensemble casts, for example, so perhaps they have more comics with two women simply because they have more characters in their comics.

This turns out to be partly true, but not quite enough to account for Marvel’s dominance in this area. About half of all comics with more than two characters of any gender are published by Marvel, while DC contributes about a third.

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citizens at work: how small groups address large-scale problems

(Orlando) I am on my way home from a meeting of the Florida Partnership for Civic Learning. I’d like to argue that it exemplifies citizens’ work. To be sure, it has a specific mission: improving civic education in Florida’s k-12 schools. And it enlists a specific kind of person: professionals in k12 schools, ed schools, and state agencies, all of whom participate in the effort as part of their jobs. It thus differs in significant ways from a group of miners forming a union or volunteers fixing a neighborhood park. (I can spot k12 teachers and ed-school professors from 500 yards away, due to some ineffable mix of demographics, fashion/accessories, and ways of navigating the physical world). Still, the essential features of this group would apply to different issues and different people.

Using the terms I summarize in this 10-minute video, groups of effective citizens seriously ask the question, “What should we do?” That question implies a deep consideration of values, of facts and constraints, and of strategies. The group not only discusses (deliberates), but also takes collective action (collaborates) and learns from the results of its own actions. Finally, it is attentive to relationships both within the group and with outsiders. It specifically promotes civic relationships, which imply certain values–such as mutual respect and accountability–without relying on personal friendships or financial ties. Because the fundamental question is “What we should do (about some large question)?” the group is satisfied neither with just doing something by itself that has limited effects nor with wishing or hoping that someone else acts. It finds leverage over larger systems.

Without going into details about the Florida Partnership or its current work, I would argue that it embodies all the key words in the previous paragraph. The question for the Partnership is “What should we do to improve civic learning for all Florida students?” The main value-questions include: “What is important for a citizen to learn and know?”, “What rights/obligations do schools have to educate citizens?” and “What constitutes just outcomes for the population of students across the state?” Participants discuss extensive factual information: 7th grade civics test scores for every student in the state, detailed survey data on students’ values and behaviors, and information on the effectiveness of various programs. At this particular meeting, we looked at regression models that predicted test scores, elaborate maps of schools that surpassed expectations, toplines from surveys, and qualitative reports from some of those schools. Participants spent time building relationships among themselves and with other actors. Finally, the group considered a whole range of strategies, from working with elementary reading organizations to changing course requirements in state colleges.

Nothing is perfect, but I think we did a good job of avoiding these classic pitfalls:

  1. Turning everything into a communications problem, a problem of “getting the word out.” In an era of constant marketing and propaganda, it seems to come as second nature to focus on “messaging.” But rarely is the main problem that lots of people believe the wrong things. And even when they do, communicating is challenging in a very crowded media environment. Smart groups communicate as they need to but don’t overemphasize its importance.
  2. Imagining phantom agents. It’s a constant temptation to imagine–or hope–that someone else will solve a problem. Someone else’s actions may indeed be essential. For instance, it may take the state legislature to improve civics. But then the question becomes: How can we influence the legislature? The “we” has to be concrete and real: an actual list of individuals who know what to do next. We are the ones we have been waiting for.
  3. Oscillating between the trivial and the utopian. I have often observed groups jump back and forth between the ends of a spectrum of practicality. At one moment, they will convince themselves that a given problem cannot be solved without changing the whole political/economic system. At another moment, they will talk about making one presentation at someone else’s small-scale meeting. To make a substantial difference, you have to find space between those extremes.
  4. Operating at only one level of power. According to the train of thinking inaugurated by Steven Lukes and John Gaventa in the 1970s, power operates at several levels. There is explicit power: the power to do something (such as require a statewide civics test or grade an individual kid). There is the power to set agendas. There is power over other people’s preferences and values. And there is power to affect who uses the other forms of power. Truly effective citizen groups think at all these levels.
  5. Losing the moral questions in data. We have civics test scores for every 7th grader in Florida, and my colleagues have analyzed those data in several illuminating ways (geospatially, demographically, even qualitatively). But it is fundamentally a moral question what to measure on a 7th grade civics test. It is also a moral question whether the state should test students, and what consequences should follow from success or failure on a test. Finally, given a distribution of real test scores, it is a moral question what to do next. Should you devote all your resources to serving the lowest-scorers? Raise the median? Reward the high-scorers? In an age of positivism, we tend to be better at analyzing the data than at reasoning about what the data imply morally. But good groups hold philosophically diverse and productive explicit discussions of the moral issues.
  6. Losing sight of either the short-term or the long-term. Really effective citizen groups achieve short-term victories with an eye to building momentum and winning longer-term victories later. The two mistakes to avoid are looking only for easy “wins” that don’t create momentum or working directly on long-term problems without having enough people or money to sustain the effort.

Calm is not Rational

I’ve written a bit before about Tyler Cowen’s idea for a fallacy of mood affiliation, and I generally find something useful in discussions of it. Here’s the basic story:

It seems to me that people are first choosing a mood or attitude, and then finding the disparate views which match to that mood and, to themselves, justifying those views by the mood.  I call this the “fallacy of mood affiliation,” and it is one of the most underreported fallacies in human reasoning.  (In the context of economic growth debates, the underlying mood is often “optimism” or “pessimism” per se and then a bunch of ought-to-be-independent views fall out from the chosen mood.)

Byran Caplan offers some reflections on using mood as a credibility heuristic (that are consonant with others things he has said) and so it seems worth discussing where he goes wrong.

On Caplan’s account, evidence is the best way to judge credibility and truth. There we agree. But he adds that using appropriate mood as a heuristic for credibility is a wise backup for discounting some movements or claims. He describes the appropriate moods that environmental activists ought to bring to bear on fossil fuels:

A reasonable person who was convinced that fossil fuels posed a major danger would feel a specific package of moods:

1. Sadness that a crucial resource has terrible side effects.

2. Gratitude for all the wonders the resource brought us in the past.

3. Resignation that mankind must forego many of these wonders.

4. Determination to salvage as many wonders as possible by using the best available substitutes for fossil fuels.

When an opponent of fossil fuels evinces none of these moods, it strongly suggests he isn’t reasonable.

This seems unlikely to be true. On the one hand, I do think those are basically the right judgments about fossil fuels: they are awesome, we should be glad that they existed, and it really sucks that we’re going to be giving them up, but it’s time to take action. That said, it’s not clear why I can’t also feel:

  1. Anger that providence does not supply as good a solution without the costs.
  2. Resentment that those who have profited from fossil fuel extraction are willfully denying the evidence that we must change.
  3. Frustration that scientific consensus does not bind more of my fellow citizens and their elected representatives.
  4. Suspicion of the ways that our current interests cause us to downplay the risks and need for resignation and determination.

Those seem perfectly rational to me, too. And we might not be able to hold all those emotions in our mind at the same time, and thus we find that we’re unable to capture the state of perfectly neutral ambivalence that Caplan here suggests is a prerequisite for being considered rational. Worse, though, Caplan’s account of those prerequisite “moods” mistakes how social movements work with how scholars comport themselves.

  1. For Cowen, mood is about having too much of the wrong sort of alignment within your portfolios of beliefs. So mood affiliation is not about demeanor but about getting your beliefs to support your preferred mood (like the just world fallacy.) Some things are good and some things bad, some things are more certain than others, etc. And yet we tend to adopt similar judgments rather than diversify, suggesting that it’s us and not the world that’s drawing those beliefs together. So Bryan Caplan is not using mood in Cowen’s sense, but rather describing something like demeanor.
  2. Most of the evidence suggests that groups of people actively resisting the status quo fall into group polarization dynamics. This is regardless of whether the status quo is just or unjust or safe or dangerous. This means that they will tend to circulate ideas and attitudes among themselves, developing more extreme and fanatical opposition to it than the overall community could support. Thus a heuristic based on demeanor is basically a pro-status quo heuristic.
  3. Sometimes this polarization is primarily attitudinal, and sometimes it is primarily evidential: that is, sometimes movement members help each other engage in motivated reasoning and skepticism, and sometimes they help each other by egging each other on with a bias for action. The attitudinal polarization is likely to be MORE reasonable than the evidential one. Yet representatives of the status quo can then use those attitudinal group polarization dynamics to depict the resistors as irrational and thus wrong. (We can see this in all sorts of places, not just the standard ones.)
  4. The demeanors of calm and dispassionate analysis are, frankly, overrated by college professors and college graduates. It’s how we signal competence, but it’s not the same as subject-matter competence, rather it’s generally a prerequisite competence in dealing with other college graduates.
  5. Lots of obviously wrong people demonstrate the wrong demeanors. But lots of *subtly* wrong people have the right demeanors. Probably then, we should actually develop enough subject-matter expertise to parse the evidence (as Caplan is doing by reading Epstein) and not rely on demeanor so much as a heuristic.

Basically, where I see Cowen contributing is in allowing us to reflect on the ways that our ideas may be too tightly connected to each other by some overarching mood or partisan affiliation. Disaggregation, decoupling, debundling: these aren’t always smart epistemological moves, but there’s a lot of good reasons to experiment with them, rooted in methodological individualism and the necessities of the scientific method.

Caplan, by contrast, seems to want to use it as a heuristic for discrediting others. I’ll admit a bias here: I really want to bend over backwards to understand the views of others and listen carefully to their arguments in hopes of finding useful insights. That’s my fallibilism talking, a mood that I’m quite sure has its own pitfalls. But still, doesn’t it seem unwise to pretend you can’t hear people just because they are shouting? After all, they’re very likely to be shouting because no one listened when they spoke.

Open Gov’t Action Plan Holds Promise for D&D, Civic Tech

Just over a month ago, the White House released the third version of its Open Government National Action Plan that includes upwards of 40 initiatives to advance its commitment to “an open and citizen-centered government,” and we encourage NCDD members to take a look at it. While the plan covers a lot of ground, some of that ground is in our field, and that could mean opportunities to grow and deepen our work that we won’t want to miss.

The Open Government Action Plan is part of the White House’s involvement in the international Open Government Partnership (OGP), in which 66 countries participate as a way to “increase public integrity, enhance public access to information, improve management of public resources, and give the public a more active voice in government processes.” All of the goals of the OGP can be a boon to both the field of dialogue & deliberation as well as civic tech, so we encourage folks to take notice of the parts of the Open Government Action Plan that may pertain to your specific niche or even create new funding streams or partnerships that you can take advantage of.

For example, the White House’s plan includes a promise that it “will work with communities, non-profits, civic technologists, and foundation partners to develop new commitments that will expand the use of participatory budgeting in the United States,” so if you are thinking about trying PB as a part of your D&D work, now is the time!

For some more of an idea of what’s in the plan, read this snippet from the White House’s recent blog post on its release:

In the third Open Government National Action Plan, the Administration both broadens and deepens efforts to help government become more open and more citizen-centered. The plan includes new and impactful steps the Administration is taking to openly and collaboratively deliver government services and to support open government efforts across the country. These efforts prioritize a citizen-centric approach to government, including improved access to publicly available data to provide everyday Americans with the knowledge and tools necessary to make informed decisions.

We see this commitment to open and “citizen-centered” government as a direct result of the years of our field’s work and as a sign that now is the time to keep stepping up our contributions to better, more democratic governance at all levels. We encourage our members and others in the D&D and civic tech field to use this White House plan as a platform to continue moving forward in bigger and better ways!

You can find all the specifics of what’s in the report by downloading the PDF version of it at www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/final_us_open_government_national_action_plan_3_0.pdf.

We also encourage you to read the full version of the White House blog post on the report’s release at www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2015/10/27/advancing-open-and-citizen-centered-government.

The More Things Change…

When I was in 8th grade, a newly hired teacher came into our classroom after lunch one day and announced that a parent had seen a student throwing rocks at passing cars. The parent wasn’t sure who the student was, so had simply given a description when reporting the matter to the principal.

Someone was in trouble. It just wasn’t clear who.

To deal with the matter, the teacher pulled all the kids fitting the description out of class and sent them to the principal’s office. The students were to remain there until further notice.

To all of us kids, it was clear that this plan was foolish. How would detaining an essentially random group of students really help anything? How did it make any sense to hold a whole group responsible for the actions of one unknown assailant? And furthermore, it was grossly unfair – why punish innocent students for simply looking like someone who misbehaved?

As it turns out, the whole thing was an elaborate set up introducing Japanese internment in the United States.

Following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, fear of people of Japanese ancestry mounted. Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt, head of the Western Command, testified as much to Congress in 1943, saying:

I don’t want any of them (persons of Japanese ancestry) here. They are a dangerous element. There is no way to determine their loyalty. The west coast contains too many vital installations essential to the defense of the country to allow any Japanese on this coast. … The danger of the Japanese was, and is now – if they are permitted to come back – espionage and sabotage. It makes no difference whether he is an American citizen, he is still a Japanese. American citizenship does not necessarily determine loyalty. … But we must worry about the Japanese all the time until he is wiped off the map.’

Ultimately, between 1942 and 1946, 120,000 people were forced to relocate to U.S. internment camps “as a result of the military evacuation of the West Coast.” Some 62 percent of those detained were American citizens.

It was a dark chapter in our nation’s history. A moment whose only saving grace was the indelible stain left by these camps, pockmarked across the west. Haunting testaments to the nation we should never let ourselves become again.

I’d like to think that we have all learned something from those darker days. Learned to love our neighbors and to not let fear drive us towards hate. I’d like to think that’d we’ve learned that all people truly are created equal, and are all equally endowed with our most sacred inalienable rights; life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

 

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Deliberative Polling® in the Bududa and Butalejja Districts of Uganda

Author: 
This was a unique case of deliberative polling in the MT Elgon Region in Uganda, where members of the public asked to give their say on regional issues regarding ‘Resettlement Management, Land Management and Population Pressure’. This initiative is not only the first of its kind in Africa but also...

new chapter on generational trends in US politics

(Orlando, FL) I was asked to write a chapter about the US for an international book about “youth disaffection with politics.” I looked at 40-year trends in more than 20 survey questions, ranging from trust in government to support for government programs to turnout. I really did not find evidence of “youth disaffection” in the US. All Americans are pretty alienated, but it isn’t a generational pattern. Most of the trends I looked at aren’t generational at all–they rise and fall with recent news and events.

My chapter is mainly an argument against thinking of alienation from politics and government in generational terms, at least for the US. I even venture that a generational framework is generally problematic. It distracts attention from the most important phenomenon, which is the stubborn replication of the same inequalities from decade to decade. I am for studying and supporting youth, but not because today’s youth are different in some fundamental way from their predecessors. Rather, institutions should finally treat a new generation better so that we begin to see some meaningful differences.

See “Youth Disaffection with Politics: The US Case,” in Pedro Pérez Herrero (ed.) Desaffección política y gobernabilidad: el reto politíco (Madrid: Instituto Universitario de Investigación en Estudios Latinamericanos, 2015), pp. 45-60. See also the Millennials and politics and Letter to a Young Political Reformer.

Reflections on a First Semester

As my first semester comes to a close, I’ve been reflecting a lot on my experiences over the past few months.

I have learned so much – though the act of trying to enumerate just what I’ve learned seems far too daunting for today. Learning is a funny thing, you know. The growth that comes from learning is far more than the accumulation of facts. It’s a subtle process that involves slowly acquiring not only facts, but ways of thinking and approaching problems.

David Williamson Shaffer of the University of Wisconsin-Madison writes about this a lot in his work on epistemic frames. Building on the concept of “communities of practices” – spaces where people within a given field share similar approaches – Shaffer describes epistemic frames as “the ways of knowing with associated with particular communities of practice. These frames have a basis in content knowledge, interest, identity, and associated practices, but epistemic frames are more than merely collections of facts, interests, affiliations, and activities…knowing where to begin looking and asking questions, knowing what constitutes appropriate evidence to consider or information to assess, knowing how to go about gathering that evidence, and knowing when to draw a conclusion and/or move on to a different issue.”

So, essentially, over this first semester, I have been learning how to see the world through a particular epistemic frame: learning what questions to ask and what tools to deploy in answering them.

There is, of course, still so much to learn, but I’m walking away from this first semester with critical thinking skills that will serve me well in the years to come.

More important than the facts I studied or the equations I learned, was the constant challenge: what does this mean?

It is not enough to know how to write a program or how to call a function that will do all the hard work for you. (Okay, I’m still learning to do that!) It is great to be able to do those things, but those skills are only valuable if you know what it means – if you understand how the calculation is done and can properly interpret the results. So, that is what I have learned this semester: I have learned to think critically, to question my own intuition as well as the equations that are put in front of me.

And, of course, I have had a ton of fun.

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