You Can Time Who's Talking More, Men or Women, With the Updated GA Tally App
Remember Marilee Talkington’s interjection of “let her speak” from the audience at the World Science Festival? Six distinguished scientists discussed string theory on stage and the single woman among them was talked over, talked for, and interrupted.
Inviting women to the table but not letting them speak makes women little more than window dressing, yet it happens consistently. Princeton and Brigham Young Universities have done the research and estimate that men will consume an average of 75% of talk time at meetings with equal gender representation.
It’s time for change.
Enter the new version of the GA Tally.
Now, not only can you represent who is actually on stage, but you can also track who is talking minute by minute, second by second.
Back in August, we introduced you to Cathy Deng, creator of Are Men Talking Too Much. Fed up that men’s voices were dominating the conversations even at gender-diverse events and inspired by the work of GenderAvenger, Deng built a tool that literally counts women’s voices. It measures who is talking, men or women, and how much. We thought the idea was brilliant and perfectly aligned with the GA Tally, so, with Deng’s help, it is now part of our toolkit.
Now you can not only count who's in the room but also measure who's dominating the conversation.
This new tool in the GA Tally app, along with GenderAvenger’s tagline “women’s voices count”, gives us the ability to not only count who is actually in the room but also measure who is dominating the conversation. Whether it be a morning news show, Olympics coverage, a favorite podcast, or a conference panel, it’s important to make sure that women get equal speaking time to men.
We’ve been test-driving the app in one of our favorite arenas: cable news programming. Featuring expert panel upon panel, it’s a great venue to study who is getting airtime and who is not.
Take the February 19th episode of Anderson Cooper 360, for example. Here’s what the panel looked like:
You might think that the lone woman pundit, Kirsten Powers, would get close to 25% of the talk time. Not so. She spoke for just 16% of the time. (Note: the host, Cooper, was not included in our count.)
Okay, maybe that was an anomaly. Let’s look at the second panel, which had equal gender balance.
While the discussion may have appeared balanced, measuring with the GA Tally’s Who Talks tells a somewhat different story.
On the other hand (and to our surprise given how often we have been critical of Morning Joe) measuring this gender-balanced panel revealed equal representation of women’s voices.
Of course, these are just two isolated moments within the 24 hour cable cycle. We need loads more examples.
Want to help? Have some fun and help us by testing the new version of the GA Tally!
Don’t have the app yet? Download the GA Tally here! If you already have the app, the update will be automatic.
We are so excited about the addition of #WhoTalks to our GA Tally, and we can’t wait to see what you find.