Perhaps bored, certainly creative, fi5e at ni9e tore all of the faces out of the SkyMall magazine and arranged them on her tray by race and gender.
Here’s what it looks like by gender:
By race:
So women outnumbered men significantly and the magazine included almost exclusively white (appearing) people.
She also arranged them by size and hair color, if you want to check it out.
Thanks to Macon D for pointing to this post in a comments thread!
—————————
Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.
Comments 17
Anonymous — November 28, 2009
That's really interesting. It suggests that white women are used most often (the most appealing) It;s surprising that there are more women, if the magazine is gender neutral, or aimed at both. I guess it's like how men's magazines have skinny white cover girls... and so do women's magazines.
The whiteness does not surprise me.
Emma — November 28, 2009
Hmm, only a bimodal distribution for race, but a nice spectrum for hair colour? What gives?
Shana — November 28, 2009
Its for Sky MALL, so apparently the majority of their target audience (shoppers) are or assumed to be white chicks. Of course few men and virtually no other races buy stuff at the ridiculously overpriced Sky Mall, only white women would be so gullible. (sarcasm here, spare the flames)
Ed — November 28, 2009
Just a few days ago I found a 'Photoshop disaster' in Skymall and thought of Soc Images. It was an ad for some kind of foam padding for a woman's behind. The 'before' picture was ridiculous - her whole pelvis had been shrunk to about half the size of a real pelvis. The 'after' picture looked like the original, unedited photo.
Aaron Perlut — November 29, 2009
Very funny only in that every time I get on a plane, the first thing I do is open the Sky Mall and see how many non-white faces I can find. Having just flown to and from Puerto Rico this past week, I was checking Air Tran's version and found none. Usually I find one non-white face per issue. Once I found two -- banner event!
Ryan Thompson — November 29, 2009
I see a few people on the right side that look pretty non-white. Namely the woman in the larger image, in the middle of the upper half. But yeah, I see what you mean :| Aaron's experience is even more unsettling...
AL — November 29, 2009
Interesting, but racialization she enacts upon the subjects is problematic.
anezka — November 29, 2009
How can you tell persons race or ethnicity by looks again? "Black" is not race or ethnicity, for an example. Nor is "white" race or ethnicity. People that are black or white are of numerous ethnicities and races.
Very typical american-minded labelling of people that has really nothing what so ever to do with the real concepts "race" or ethnicity but more to do with some fabricated social norms on how americans understand these things.