Hey NPR! Women Intellectuals Exist!

If you're like me, you can tell time by the NPR show playing on your radio. The nasally guffaws of Click and Clack on a Saturday morning tell me I've slept way too late. At night, BBC's World Service tells me to get in bed and turn out the light. And Intelligence Squared, the weekly "Oxford-style" debate show I have recently discovered, tells me it's time for an entertaining and thought-provoking Sunday lunch.

An entertaining, thought-provoking, male-dominated lunch, it turns out.

Intelligence Squared is an hour-long debate show whose podcast gets over 100,000 downloads each month. The show presents a proposition--for example, "Israel Can Live with a Nuclear Iran"--and brings in four to six panelists to debate it. The audience votes at the start and the end of each debate, and whichever side moves the most voters wins. The show, which airs on over 200 NPR stations--and, as of January, will air nationally on PBS--aims to "bring together the world’s leading authorities on the day’s most important issues," according to its website. But an analysis of the entire 69-debate history stretching back to 2007 reveals that the show all too often defines the "world's leading authorities" as male.

Of 69 debates, a full 29 (42%) featured all-male panels. Another 27 had only one woman on the panel. And over 91% of the debates featured panels that were either all or majority male.

By contrast, only four panels had equal numbers of male and female debaters, and a paltry two debates featured more female than male panelists. Not a single panel featured all women. Notably, one of the two debates with more women than men centered around a gendered question: "It's Wrong to Pay for Sex." And because the host and moderator is a man, listeners to shows with an evenly split panel would still hear a discussion dominated were dominated by male voices.

The show's website features a stirring tribute to the power of debate, "the cornerstone of American progress." Debates, the show proclaims,

embody our democratic ideas as a society, proving both sides of an argument offer intellectually respectable points of view. Too often we are isolated in “echo chambers,” funnels through which our opinions are reinforced by biased media outlets, personalized technology and like-minded associations. Debate challenges our own lack of objectivity, where our minds have been contaminated by conviction.

It's a worthy goal. But instead of offering robust, diverse perspectives on the most pressing questions of our time, Intelligence Squared has created its own "echo chamber," this one reverberating with the voices of men.

What's going on here? How is it that the show's producers haven't found it uncomfortable, if not embarrassing, to feature so many all-male discussions? This is a particularly puzzling question given that the production is almost entirely female, including executive producer S. Dana Wolfe.

I called up Intelligence Squared's PR contact to see if I could get some answers. Although they would not comment on the record to a freelance writer, the person I spoke with said that the extreme gender imbalance of the show's panelists is "something that has been brought to their attention."

It's reassuring that all-female production staff is aware that it's a problem for a show priding itself on "intelligent discussion" to marginalize female voices. But that awareness doesn't appear to be changing anything: Of the four upcoming debates listed on the website, two feature all male panels, one has only one woman, and the fourth has only two confirmed guests--both of whom are men.