This week in class, the show ‘Supergirl’ was analyzed by taking a look at the ratio of men to women speaking.

For my data I had a total of seven female characters talk, this is with Kara and her other selves being counted as one. I counted women speaking for a total of 16 minutes. I do not have access to the total data but it did seem like the women spent more time talking than men, which would make sense considering this is a show about a female superhero’s life. So it might seem like a great women empowering show. I did some digging to see if I could counter this idea, I will say ahead of time that some of it might seem like over-analyzing. Towards the beginning of the episode Kara got herself almost fired and was saved by James, Kara didn’t do any saving until she got to the plane. Which ended up being a mess as she showed herself to the world and destroyed some of the bridge. If I recall correctly someone even mentioned how come they got Supergirl instead of Superman. So in the scene where the male does the saving everything goes smoothly but in the female saving scene a mess occurs. Though this might just be your stereotypical hero starting out being bad at being a hero part.

Now for the quantitative part of the analysis. I took a look at the IMDb page for ‘Supergirl.’ For the characters that appeared in all 42 episodes three of them were men while only two were women. It did seem the list became more lady friendly after the initial main characters. Then, the producer and writer list caught my eye. Out of the 17 directors who got credit, only three were women. And the directors who had more than one episode were all men. Next, out of the five writers who were part of all 42 episodes, only one was a women. Which is a bit funny considering it would be expected that women would be the experts at writing about women.

My argument was more in the over analyzing area, but I thought it did give a few counter examples of why Supergirl might not really be a women centric show especially once you look under the surface.