She was a mother. He was a pioneer.

By Weihua Li, Coral Negrón, Diana Baptista

December 14, 2018

Each year, The New York Times' Obituary Desk writes about thousands of people who passed away. These are men and women who left a mark on the world: leaders, pioneers, creators, and a lot more.

We scraped every obituary published in The Times since January 1, 1996 (the year NYT launched its website) and October 22, 2018. Then we analyzed why they decided to write about a person's death. Was it for their life's achievements? Were they related to someone famous? Did they die in extraordinary circumstances?

We found a marked difference in the amount and characteristics of the obituaries written for each gender. In the chart below, we drew a line that shows how many of the obituaries were about men -- and how it changed over the years. Now it's your turn to draw the same line for women.

Draw your line

Family links

The Times wrote 21,837 obituaries from 1996 to 2018. Of them, 17,782 were about men, and only 4,055 about women.

Next we looked into what each gender is mostly remembered by. The Times wrote about people involved in every area of expertise: politicians, athletes, scientists, dissidents, activists.

For headlines about perished men, it was typical to use the term "father" when talking about inventors, creators or iconic politicians. For example, Victor Mills was described as the "father of disposable diapers" and Yasir Arafat as the "father and leader of palestinian nationalism."

Women, however, are mostly remembered because they were related to someone famous. Helene Giuliani was remebered as "mother of former New York Mayor".

Art for women, science for men

We selected several professions or activities and analyzed how each gender is related to it. The term feminist was used to describe females 42 times, meanwhile just two men were described as feminist in a headline. Learn more about this descriptions here:

She's an advocate, he's a discoverer