Someone (Ahem) Did a Statistical Analysis of Vox.com Photos, And It's Actually Pretty Depressing

    The other day, Vox.com ran a piece entitled "Someone did a statistical analysis of New Yorker cartoons, and it's actually pretty depressing." The semi-serious article presented the findings in the "semi-satirical journal Proceedings of the Natural Institute of Science" regarding the race and gender of characters in the semi-iconic New Yorker cartoons. The study found that "[o]ut of 1,810 total characters, 1,277 (about 70.6 percent) were male, and 1,714 (94.7 percent) were white." Vox writer Joseph Stromberg argues that there is a "need for accurate representation of nonwhite guys", and not just in movies and on TV. Stromberg quotes Amy Rothschild of the FiveThirtyEight blog asserting that it's a problem "[w]hen whole groups of people appear as stereotypes or not at all[.]" Rothschild was referring to children's books, but Stromberg says "adults are impressionable, too."
     After reading the article, I became curious about what impressionable adults might find to skew their something-other-than-the-content-of-a-persons-character worldview on the site where the article appeared, Vox.com. Since Vox does not regularly produce cartoons, I decided to use as a proxy a Google search of the Vox.com site of the first 100 facial images since the beginning of 2015. (Small sample size, but I have staff limitations.) You won't, as they say, believe what happened next:

    Read 'em and weep:

• 81% "white dudes", as Vox likes to say
• 9% women, all white
• 10% non-whites (and four of them are President Obama)

     Others may come up with slightly different figures. I am particularly bad at guessing a person's race (maybe that's a good thing?)
     Anyway, to try to eliminate the possibility that Google itself is the culprit in white-male-skewing the results, I also conducted a general (the whole web) image search for "faces" since the beginning of the year.

     At a glance, the results seem more eclectic (certainly more women than men), but I did not conduct a full statistical analysis (again, staffing issues...).
     I decided to do a few more for comparison. Here's the New York Times:

     Looks like quite a variety.

     How about MSNBC?

     Whoa. Elizabeth Warren is looking pretty lonely there, eh, MSNBC?
   
     And finally, just for fun, The New Yorker's website:

     It appears the "white dude" dominance at The New Yorker is largely confined to the cartoons.

     So what conclusions can we draw from these analyses? Got me. I think I got a C in Statistics in college. I told you we have staffing issues.

Unemployed, Discouraged, Underemployed Rate Jumps to 14.3%, Highest Since February

    While the Bureau of Labor Statistics jobs report released this morning showed unemployment unchanged at 7.6 precent, the broadest measure of unemployment, the U-6 rate (seasonally adjusted), jumped from 13.8% to 14.3%, its highest level since February 2013.

    The U-6 rate includes "all persons marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part time for economic reasons," including discouraged and underemployed workers, as well as the unemployed.  The rate is only a half-point lower than the 14.8% rate a year ago in June 2012.


Note: A version of this article appeared first at The Weekly Standard.