Demographics of Stargate SG-1, season one.

[dsudis]

Inspired by beccaelizabeth's counting of characters in Torchwood, I decided to count characters in Stargate SG-1 while rewatching, to calculate percentages of female characters and characters of color. (SPOILER: the results were kinda depressing.)

Methodology: I counted the number of speaking characters per episode. Partly just as a matter of feasibility, I

Comments

[daveamongus]

Tony Amendola is an interesting case because, in this instance, I think it's possible to consider him as "codedly" PoC in the role of Bra'tac, even though he's a paisan from Connecticut. But I'd only go so far as to assert that it's possible.

[dsudis]

Yyyeah. I counted him, out of a combination of 'Well of course Bra'tac and Teal'c are of the same racial identity' and 'character != actor' and 'Oh God the stats are so much worse if Bra'tac is a white guy.' But it's a definite caveat (and the tendency to have white actors portraying characters of color or characters who damn well ought to be of color is not totally isolated, as in "Emancipation" where the only woman who speaks apart from Sam is the astoundingly white-looking daughter of two definitely Asian characters).

[daveamongus]

Nice icon, btw.

Anyway, like I said, I think the case can be made that Bra'tac fills the role of a PoC in many ways, but I also think he does it without wearing blackface, so to speak. Which yeah, makes it, er, kind of grey. As it were.

[dsudis]

Thanks! I needed a Sam icon and a team-y icon and a general purpose icon and this one seemed like it worked pretty well. *g*

And... oh, show. Yeah.

[treewishes]

Oh, god, we need to do this kind of analysis for lots of fandoms, don't we?

[dsudis]

I think we do. I started counting Stargate SG-1 mainly because I felt the need to do it for something but couldn't face doing it for Supernatural. /o\

counting: cool and useful :-)

[beccaelizabeth]

Have averaged the % of women characters.
1/4 of team SG1 are women
and an average of 25% of speaking characters overall.

... which is weird because on Torchwood it's 2/5 and nearly 40%
so the proportions match.

Also
25% ???

The bloke down the pub SF fanboy opinion (from last week) is that military shows don't have as many women because the military doesn't have many women.
The fangirl sitting right here opinion is that their representations of the military aren't big with the realism in other respects, so why stick with this one? And the people they go out and meet aren't all military, so the logic doesn't hold.

Average % characters of color works out at 21% I think
which matches what Wiki says about the USA
but it looks like half the eps are under

"There are two people of color but TEAL'C IS BOTH OF THEM"
is one of those notes that I know makes perfect sense but still makes me blinky.

Re: counting: cool and useful :-)

[dsudis]

Thanks! It occurred to me that I should have done averages and totals and things with the main chart, but then I got distracted by something shiny.

That is strange about the way the total proportions of women match the proportion of the central team. I wonder if that holds true for other shows as well...?

I did consider including some sort of note about the proportions of women: the USAF reports that Air Force personnel are a little under 20% women, so an episode like "Solitudes" which is all Air Force personnel (um, if you're willing to include Daniel and Teal'c under that heading, but let's!) and includes Sam as the only woman who speaks but that makes 14.3% of characters female, is actually not that far off in that respect

Re: counting: cool and useful :-)

[beccaelizabeth]

Interesting about wiki - the USA page I googled has a little box says 80% white. I confess to only reading that line. It do seem to get more complicated if I pay attention.

*nods* about not supposed to be the USA.

Re: counting: cool and useful :-)

[brown_betty]

Well, Canada is somewhat whiter, but Vancouver, where I believe is filmed, is actually more chromatic. Quick summing of this table (v. v. shoddy, etc, but I'm confident to +/- 2%) puts Vancouver at something like 43% PoC. (I excluded hispanic people, to lowball the figure)

[dsudis]

It's been... not exactly a pleasure, but sort of irresistibly fascinating.

[unicornvamp3z]

Wow :/

[dsudis]

Yyyyyeah.