I found the piece complaining about not enough women in Star Wars interesting.

This is a common complaint today made in pursuit of representation of women, ethnic/cultural groups, sexual orientation, disabilities, etc.

It got me thinking about what kind or representation would look like. We’ll start with our planet of course.

Country of Origen (which is not identical with ethnicity of course).

If we had a cast of 100 people this is how it would break down:

• 19 from China
• 17 from India (that’s already over a third of the cast for those of you keeping score)
• 4 Americans (figure out how to fairly split America’s race groups 4 ways)
• 3 from Indonesia
• 3 Brazilians
• 3 Pakistanis (half the cast roles are taken by now)
• 2 from Bangladesh
• 2 from Russia
• 2 from Japan
• You can keep going until you hit 100 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population

Age: http://www.indexmundi.com/world/demographics_profile.html I guess Hollywood has the age thing right. Very much a “young” orientation.

Affluence:

• Cars: Less than one for every 10 people. But given that there are only 4 Americans (each of them will have one) there are 6 cars for the rest of the cast (Cast of 100) to share.
• Income: The 4 Americans average almost 50k a year (not evenly distributed among the 4 BTW. Have to pay for the car). The 19 Chinese will average less than 10k a year. The 17 Indians will average less than 4k a year. The Pakistanis and Bengals will be even poorer.
• Housing, Hunger, Toilets, Again the Americans will enjoy these things, many of the other folks won’t.

How “representative” is ANYTHING we watch on TV or in the movies?