Obituaries Offer a Window On Our World

Am I the only one who reads the obituary page? Is that morbid?

I find it fascinating. The big city papers usually have nice articles about local prominent people who contributed in some way to the community, but were not “famous” for the most part. Sometimes they are teachers, professors, writers or businessmen.

But that’s just it. Most times, they are “men.” I’m not trying to start a gender war but apparently I’m not the only one who has noticed. The studying of obituaries for a look inside our culture and society has been going on for quite some time. In the 1970s, researchers began to investigate the percentage of men versus women that were mentioned in obituaries. Many researchers thought it would matter if it was an east coast paper (more the mainstream establishment) or a west coast paper (with its frontier and anything goes attitude). Apparently, it really didn’t. From the Encyclopedia of Death and Dying:

Kastenbaum and his colleagues set the bar; others challenged it using a variety of methods and data sources. For example, in 1979 Bernard Spilka, Gerald Lacey, and Barbara Gelb examined obituaries in two Denver newspapers, the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News, arguing that the West is more progressive than the East. They sampled obituaries from July 1976 through July 1977 in both papers. Their findings provided weak support for gender bias favoring males. This is most pronounced in terms of obituary length, but there is evidence that women receive fewer obituaries and fewer photographs as well. They concluded: “Economic, political, and social factors within Western society continue to support a greater valuation of males and this is perpetuated even in the manner in which one’s death is marked and remembered”.

In the 1970s, researchers believed that the “women’s movement” hadn’t progressed far enough along to make an impact on the obituaries- as those dying had been born, for the most part, before women were even given the right to vote. But research in the 1990s still showed that men continued to dominate:

Robin Moremen and Cathy Cradduck examined gender differences in obituaries in four regional newspapers in the late 1990s, following the original Kastenbaum method. In Moremen and Cradduck’s study, the New York Times represents the Northeast and is included in the original study; the Chicago Tribune represents the Midwest, the Los Angeles Times the West, and the Miami Herald the Southeast. As in previous studies, men receive significantly more obituaries than women, however, unlike the Maybury study results, Moremen and Cradduck’s study found regional differences: Obituaries are 7.69 times more likely to be written about a man than a woman in the New York Times (compared to 4.02 times in the original study); 4.21 times more likely in the Los Angeles Times; 3.11 times more likely in the Miami Herald; and 2.47 times more likely in the Chicago Tribune.

Male obituaries are longer (except for the Miami Herald), and significantly more likely to be accompanied by a photograph (except for the Miami Herald). The average age at death is seventy-nine for women and seventy-two for men, which is consistent with national averages. People in business and the performing arts receive the most recognition, with men dominating these categories. Women dominate categories like miscellaneous (including devoted to family, animals, and children; homemaker; volunteer; active with seniors), clerical/retail, and related to someone famous, usually a man.

Again, maybe those women who ran for Congress in the 1960s and 1970s hadn’t been dying yet by the 1990s. Now, there were women on the Supreme Court, more women as CEOs and more women Senators. But in November of 2006, the Chicago Tribune found itself asking the same question- are more men dying than women?

Why is it that so far this year about 73 percent of the Tribune’s obituaries are about males?

The newspaper’s research library checked previous years and found the gender breakdown roughly the same back in 2002 and in 1998. A man was the lead obituary writer one of those years, and a woman the other. The Tribune’s library also checked with other newspapers, from St. Louis to New York, and found the imbalance was similar or even greater.

The newspaper’s lead obituary writer, Trevor Jensen, said he scans news articles and death notices for interesting life stories. Obituaries should be neither tributes nor eulogies, he told me, but interesting stories that also reflect a part of society and the community. “They are lives that pique my interest and, I would hope, readers’ interest too.”

Could it be that many women’s lives just aren’t that “interesting”? It then becomes a question of what is an interesting life.

Maybe the obituaries will be changing in the next ten to twenty years as the Hillary Rodham Clinton generation starts to head to the heavenly gates.

But in a recent online interview, Bill McDonald, the obituaries editor at The New York Times, was asked whether his paper would consider an “affirmative action” policy to have more obituaries for women. “Ask me in another generation,” he replied “… the obit page is not a reflection of the times in which we live. It’s a mirror on a past that is slipping away.”

In past decades, women were not making inroads in areas that would warrant an obituary- i.e. in making money. Now, however, the tide is turning. In 2006, 70% of veterinarian students were women (making up 36% of all vets.) In the legal profession, 30% of all lawyers are women, but they make up 50% of law students (and, at some schools, are the majority.) It’s only a matter of time before these women are getting written up in the paper upon their deaths.

Or is it?