'Survivor' 51 Has a Serious Optics Issue

For those who do not watch Survivor, last week featured two eliminations, one of which was very dramatic. What’s most notable about those eliminations, however, is that both players sent home were women. In fact, the first six players voted out this season have all been women. Granted, the season started with more women than men (11 to 10), and the one man who has left quit because he, uh, how do I put this charitably: He lacked self-respect (he claimed to be injured when he clearly was not. He just couldn’t handle the elements).

The point is: Six eliminations, six women. And it’s not as if the other players — including the women — haven’t noticed. It was a talking point heading into one of this week’s tribal councils, where a player named Jelly essentially had to choose between sticking with her alliance and voting out yet another woman. She … stuck with her alliance.

This season’s streak is particularly egregious, but the pattern itself is not unusual. Someone actually studied it: Across Seasons 1 through 40, women were 72 percent more likely than men to be the first person voted out of their tribe. Women are also less likely to make it to the merge (and that’s especially true of Black women), and in the show’s first 39 seasons, there were only two in which fewer than three women were voted out pre-merge.

So what’s going on? There are two factors at play. The first is that the pre-merge is a tribe game. The “stronger” the tribe, the less likely it is to lose challenges, and even though stamina, endurance, balance, speed, and puzzle-solving matter as much as brute strength, players still tend to vote out women they perceive as “weak” in order to “keep the tribe strong.” Never mind that the same study found challenge performance doesn’t actually explain who gets voted out first. It’s an excuse more than a reason.

The second factor, which may be especially true this season, is that women are often the biggest social and strategic threats, which also puts targets on their backs. Alexis, one of the women voted out this week, said as much to Entertainment Weekly after her elimination:

I tip my hat to casting because I think if you look at the women in our season more so than the men, there are a lot of really fierce, badass women who immediately upon arriving in Fiji, everybody realized Patt is amazing at this game and she’s very strategic and she’ll go far if you let her go far. Same with Linnea. Same with I would say every woman who had been voted out thus far. So it is much more nuanced than just, you know, assuming that just the men wanted the women out.

That was certainly true of Linnea, the other woman eliminated this week in a dramatic but flukey vote. Had she made the merge, I think she could have gone very far on the strength of her social and strategic game (and her physical skills might have netted her a smattering of individual immunity wins). In her exit interview, though, she spoke more to the first factor: “Men get to run their mouths and be a little bit louder in the first half of the game without being as threatening because we need them for the challenges. So that does play a role in women going home first.”

For what it’s worth, the same study found that the gender disparity largely disappears after the merge: Once there, women and men are about equally likely to make it to the end. The study did find that men had an edge with juries over the first 40 seasons, but whatever advantage they had has clearly vanished. Women have won seven of the last 10 seasons of Survivor, which lends some weight to that second factor. The women who make it through the pre-merge gauntlet tend to be the ones with the sharpest social and strategic games, and lately, they’re the ones walking away with the million dollars (or $2 million, in the case of Aubrey Bracco).

Interestingly, another study found that physical attractiveness also plays an important role in who ultimately wins Survivor.