Women Dominate Top of the Forbes Celebrity List

This is interesting. I’m not too sure about their methodology. There are two boxers on the list that I’ve never heard of; I’ll grant that I’m not a boxing person, but I’m not a golfer either and I’ve at least heard of the golfers on the list. I would think that a list of the most powerful celebrities should contain names that the average, fairly well-informed person would know, and the sports section seems to fail that. (Though I applaud the inclusion of the two Williams sisters, Danica Patrick and Maria Sharapova. It will be interesting to see which of the standouts from the 2010 Olympics show up on the next list – Kim Yu-na might make it.)

That said, the webpage that you linked to is great. It’s organized very clearly, and you can do a fair bit of analysis based on their numbers quite easily. Which leads me to a couple of observations:

There are exactly even numbers of men and women in the categories that are broken down by gender (actors/actresses and televisions actors/television actresses). I assume that was done on purpose? If you average the scores of the members of each category, the women’s sides are slightly lower (which is to say higher – 100 is the “low” here) – 80.4 to 95.2 for TV stars, 49.1 to 59.7 for film. The number of women in the non-divided categories is pathetic – no female directors at all – except for the teen star and musician categories.

The teen star category is rather weird, though. The most obvious example is Twilight, whose Robert Pattinson is listed as an actor, but whose Kristen Stewart is listed as a teen star. “Teen star” must refer to those stars who are actually in their teens (Stewart turned 20 this April), rather than those who appeal to teens. I’m not sure why they divided up the talent that way, since all of the other categories relate to why a person is famous. Listing the teens in the other categories would make Swift the sixth-highest ranked musician on the list, for example, with Miley Cyrus right behind her. At any rate, the teen star category is one of two I found where women’s average score beats men’s (30.33 to 61), and one of two categories where women outnumber men in terms of spaces (three spots occupied by women as opposed to two by men – but one of the men’s spots holds all of the Jonas Brothers).

The other category where women take more spaces than men is modeling, where all three spots are held by women. The category where women’s average score beats men’s is the musicians, though that’s a bit problematic because of the high number of musicians not listed as musicians – four hip-hop impressarios, Swift, et cetera. The difference as is is striking: 9.8 average for female musicians, 44.5 for male. In all the numbers that I ran, the differences between men’s average score and women’s average are highest in the two gender-inclusive categories where women’s scores average higher than men’s. In other words, when women do outstrip men, they do it by larger margins than when men outstrip women. I’m not sure what to make of that.

I keep thinking that the list should perhaps reconsider its weightings a bit. The four hip-hop impressarios listed (all male) average a score of 59.25, while the three models listed average 87.33. Now, that makes sense in as far as “hip-hop impressario” seems to involve a number of different things, from producing others’ music to creating one’s own. But when you compare Lil Wayne, whose TV score is 76, and Heidi Klum, whose TV score is 74, something seems off. Wayne has been a guest or presenter on a handful of shows over the years, but Klum is the regular host of Project Runway, which is wildly popular, hosts another show in Germany and has appeared in various other TV shows. She also has at least one endorsement deal that involves TV commercials. I would think that her TV exposure would outstrip his by more than two spaces, even if you count showings of his music videos on the various music video channels.

I think I might know part of why women are missing from the middle of the range. Six of the bottom ten names fall into the actress or TV actress category. If, as I’m guessing, Forbes intentionally evened out the number of actresses and actors, the lower-ranking women were given a boost up the charts, and wouldn’t have been included otherwise. So the raw numbers would have had a bunch of uber-strong female contenders at the top and tapered off steadily as you went down the list. I’m a bit ambivalent about that. On the one hand, Forbes is trying to include women and is giving some women visibility they otherwise wouldn’t get. On the other hand, if that’s correct, that would mean that the actual situation is worse than it looks, and women don’t even make 35% of the top 100 celebrities. In that case, this list covers up a worse situation.

Always happy to crunch numbers :)

Actually, I’m thinking of trying to apply some economics to what I study (Japanese visual media), so this gives me a way to see how that might work out.