For my Tableau lab report, I chose to take a look at data pertaining to gender representation in World Wrestling Entertainment events.
Most who are acquainted with American popular culture are familiar with World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE). The publicly traded company, which coined the term “Sports Entertainment” during the 1980s to avert government regulation of traditional sports, has garnered much of its press from scores of lawsuits from parents in the late 1990s, tabloid fodder, wrestler deaths, and scandals such as Hulk Hogan’s drama with Gawker. These are examples of the few moments when wrestling transcends the confines of the WWE universe – bleeding into the ranks of popular culture for the brevity of a press cycle, if nothing more. The absurdity and contrived violence of professional wrestling has tethered it to the label of “low brow,” and has resulted in its devaluation by sports writers, politicians, academics and so on. In his Jacobin piece “Money in the Bank,” Dan O’Sullivan notes that the absurdity and subsequent deprecation is intentional, and possibly engineered by the wrestling industry itself. “The notion that pro wrestling is a fixed, low-rent travesty, undeserving of serious mainstream scrutiny — is the single greatest angle ever sold by the wrestling industry,” he says (O’Sullivan).
Take an uncritical look at WWE programming and you’ll find a cast of unbelievable talent that spans disciplines of acrobatics, martial arts, screenwriting and acting. You’ll find legions of devout wrestling fans, who, despite the scripted nature of the programming, humor the idea of an honorable competition. You’ll find scores of entertaining and often absurd storylines that subvert and resubvert fantastical hero(face)/Villain(heel) tropes, and break down the fourth wall in ways that make even the most avid fans question what’s real and what’s fake.
Take a critical approach, and you’ll find a history rife with racism, misogyny, and homophobia. You’ll find deplorable labor practices such as hiring wrestlers on a contracted basis without health insurance or pension, union busting, manipulating wrestlers’ personal lives for storylines, and shamelessly perpetuating massive income disparities between male and female pro wrestlers. These labor practices have actively contributed to the exploitation of wrestlers’ bodies, wherein fear of being written out of storylines and lack of steady income drive wrestlers to push their bodies to the limit, often enduring chronic pain and short recovery periods just to make it back into the ring. It’s commonplace for wrestlers to die young, and yet, “Pro wrestling’s greater visibility as cheesy adolescent fantasy tends to mitigate the public backlash the industry should receive” (O’Sullivan). Moreover, because wrestlers are contracted, they are at the complete mercy of their employers, who are known to take retaliatory measures against wrestlers who speak up about depressing realities of being a WWE Superstar.
The WWE makes it especially difficult to quantify my claims – offering little public information on event history, wrestler salary ranges, past storylines, and even wrestler deaths. Much of the WWE’s content is housed on Youtube and the official website, wherein information is often either barebones, buried behind layers of navigation, or nonexistent. The interesting, rich details are only available to those who actively consume pay per views, weekly shows, or watch recaps on Youtube. Beyond WWE.com’s uninspiring content quality, is the issue that WWE.com is notorious for erasing controversial wrestlers such as Chris Benoit and Hulk Hogan from the network’s history.
That said, the WWE has a huge fan base, which is meticulous about logging the specific details and nuances that the WWE website overlooks. I specifically chose to examine gender disparities because a) I know from watching wrestling that women are typically allotted merely one match per pay per view, while men are allotted the remaining 11-12 matches; b) WWE claims to be taking measures to equalize gender imbalance by introducing eras of alleged empowerment such as the “Divas Revolution” – albeit they later retired the use of “Divas” to reference to female wrestlers, replacing it with “Women’s Superstars”; and c) female pro wrestler AJ Lee (who goes by twitter handle @AJBrooks in the embedded tweets below) recently quit the WWE after being one of the first female wrestlers to speak up about WWE’s skewed gender representation and compensation. I thought it would be interesting to try to quantify her claims, because to my knowledge, there has been no previous attempt at a project of this nature.
@StephMcMahon Your female wrestlers have record selling merchandise & have starred in the highest rated segment of the show several times,
— A.J. (@AJBrooks) February 25, 2015
@StephMcMahon And yet they receive a fraction of the wages & screen time of the majority of the male roster. #UseYourVoice
— A.J. (@AJBrooks) February 25, 2015
The Data
I sourced my primary dataset from the fruits of fan labor – by copying and pasting “Results” tables from each Wrestlemania event Wikipedia page (thankfully there are only 32) and reformatting them using Google Refine. Wrestlemania was chosen for analysis because the annual event is considered the “Superbowl of Wrestling,” and despite a match schedule predetermined by WWE executives, participating in Wrestlemania is often revered as the pinnacle of a professional wrestler’s success. The “Results” tables on Wikipedia were particularly interesting to me because they had column values indicating: the wrestling match number, the results (which including all participant names), the type of match (for example: singles, triple threat, tag team), and the “duration” of each match in minutes and seconds. Even from looking at the individual tables on wikipedia, I was able to detect a noticeable disparity between the amount of wrestling screen time allotted to male and female wrestlers at each Wrestlemania. Working off of this idea, I decided to add a gender component to my data file.
I sourced a second dataset from the WWE’s photo montage list called “Every Diva Ever” by isolating every “<p class=”wwe-gallery–item–caption”></p>” element. I pulled this dataset into my initial Wikipedia dataset using an “INDEX MATCH” function embedded in an IF statement. Using this roster, I was able to indicate whether a female wrestler is present in each individual match. I should note that the WWE tends to draw very clear lines regarding gender – there is an obvious binary present in my dataset, and I acknowledge that my data does not represent the full range of identities likely present in the WWE roster.
After cleaning my data, I found several outside examples of visualizations that acknowledge gender imbalance and representation in other entertainment mediums. One of them, an article analyzing gender in film dialogue, contains a visualization of 30 Disney films and the gender breakdown of dialogue therein.
Viz #1
I modeled my first visualization after the one pasted above – choosing to show the percentage of total wrestlemania event minutes sorted by gender. The “% of Total Wrestling Match Minutes” field references the normalized sum of minutes spent wrestling during each Wrestlemania event – I did not include instances where female wrestlers “valet” male wrestlers to the ring, and I did not include event time allotted to storyline development outside the ring. I wanted the data to represent, very clearly, the amount of minutes women spend wrestling, in comparison to men. My viz also includes the date of each Wrestlemania on the x-axis, to show whether these percentages have changed over time. As you can see in the visualization, women receive only a fraction of the screen time men receive at Wrestlemania.
Only recently, from 2014-2016, have women seen a small increase in wrestling screen time. 2016 represents the highest percentage of Wrestlemania match time allotted, possibly because of the advent of the “Divas Revolution,” which was born from a widely criticized 30 second match between The Bella Twins, Paige and Emma. The hashtag #GiveDivasaChance trended for days afterward, and for the first time in years, Wrestlemania programming included two substantial women’s events (which, in my opinion, is still lousy considering men had 11 matches!).
Viz #2
My next visualization is actually two separate bar charts – one for men and one for women – sorted to display the wrestlers of each gender with the highest total amount of wrestling screen time from 1985 to present. Measuring the male wrestler with the most wrestling minutes (The Undertaker) against the female wrestler with the most wrestling minutes (Trish Status), one can see that Trish Stratus’ total minutes add up to 29.82 while The Undertaker’s total minutes add up to 419.9. That means that The Undertaker had over 13 times as much screen time as Trish Stratus – a unconscienable statistic even without considering the disparity in their total amount of wrestlemania appearances over the years. I’ll get to that later.
I think it’s also worth mentioning the sheer amount of wrestlers who have participated in Wrestlemania since its advent – and the amount of wrestlers we only witnessed for a short blip of time, then never again.
Viz #3
The final viz on my dashboard examines individual Wrestlemania matches and how match lengths have changed over time. I’ve color coded the circles indicate whether a female wrestler was present in the match, and sized circles to reflect match length in minutes. The larger the circle, the longer the match and vice versa.
By analyzing the graph visually, I was able to glean two separate findings. The first is that, from 1992 to 1998, Wrestlemania events contained far fewer matches than they did at both the advent of Wrestlemania and in current times. One possible reason for this has to do with an ongoing ratings war between the “big three” wrestling promotions – WWF (World Wrestling Federation), WCW (World Championship Wrestling) and ECW (Extreme Championship Wrestling) – leading up until their consolidation in 2001 and 2002. In the late 1990s, the three promotions competed against one another ruthlessly, each company pulling out a variety of stops to topple the competition. For a time, WWF wavered, floundering in ratings from 1996-1998 – which is precisely when the amount of Wrestlemania matches was at an all time low. It’s possible that the WWF simply couldn’t afford the air time to host a three hour event, or, perhaps there just weren’t enough wrestlers to make for robust programming due to talent being spread across three separate promotions. Another possible reason for the 1992 dip in match numbers is the the WWF’s highly publicized, damning scandal involving steroid use and sexual harassment of WWF employees. According to Wikipedia, the steroid trial cost WWF over $5 million at a time of record low revenue.
The next visible trend in my wrestling match viz pertains to the steady increase in match lengths over time. Over the 32 years of Wrestlemania, there seems to have been a subtle shift from matches in the 5 to 15 minute range, to matches in the 15 to 30 minute range. Given more time, I would like to find a clearer method to represent this increase, because I’m not sure circles convey my findings most effectively. Despite this, my insight begs the question: what are the health implications for wrestlers givens that match durations have virtually doubled in the past 32 years? In the future, it would be interesting to take a look at data on professional wrestling injuries to trace whether these figures have increased or decreased through the years.
Future Projects
I created one additional visualization which I chose not to display on my dashboard because it’s still a work in progress. The graph is a box and whiskers plot meant to show the range years when individual wrestlers participated in Wrestlemania, wherein the gray boxes are configured to represent the highest density of Wrestlemania appearances – ostensibly the ‘peak’ of a pro wrestler’s career. Because there are a number of pay per view events beyond Wrestlemania, it wouldn’t be fair or accurate to define the longevity of wrestler’s career by Wrestlemania appearances. I do, however, think that this box and whiskers plot is a strong indicator of each wrestler’s time “in the spotlight.” Similar to my other graphs, there is a noticeable disparity wherein the top male superstars typically wrestle for a decade or more, and in 5+ Wrestlemanias, while the top female wrestlers often have fewer than 5 appearances and career spanning 4 to 5 years.
It would be interesting to examine why female wrestlers tend to have their careers cut short sooner than their male counterparts, although when one reads between the lines, there seems to be a clearly defined path of disposability for most professional wrestlers, men included. The contractual nature of WWE employment means that at any moment a wrestler can be pulled from the spotlight and released, or in the slightly more desirable scenario – cast as an “enhancement entertainer” whose sole purpose is to lose matches and make the John Cenas of the world look good. I’ll end with this quote from Dan O’Sullivan’s piece for Jacobin: “It is hard to think of a laborer — outside of, perhaps, the sex industry — who better exhibits this rotten duality, of desirability and disposability, of being “warmly welcomed, always turned away,” than a wrestler.
The link to my full Tableau dashboard can be found here
My “work in progress” graph can be found here
Sources Cited
O’Sullivan, Dan. “Money in the Bank.” https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/08/money-in-the-bank/
WWE article on Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WWE