[acqq]

Never thought about this, good that it's completely provable:

"If we look at the supporting cast, the 14 most prominent characters are all male before we get to the first woman, Mrs. Krabappel, and only 5 of the top 50 supporting cast members are women.

Women account for 25% of the dialogue on The Simpsons, including Marge and Lisa, two of the show’s main characters. If we remove the Simpson nuclear family, things look even more lopsided: women account for less than 10% of the supporting cast’s dialogue.

A look at the show’s list of writers reveals that 9 of the top 10 writers are male."

[namewithhe1d]

How about taking a look at the voice talent to understand why the characters are largely male dominated? Dan Castellaneta, Hank Azaria and Harry Shearer account for the largest majority of characters on the show. They have incredible flexibility and range. Nancy Cartwright voices Bart (not accounted for in the male/female numbers) and several other male characters, and thus expands the male repertoire. Yeardley Smith (Lisa) and Julie Kavner (Marge) have pretty distinct voices, and while incredibly talented, don't contribute many more characters to the show outside of "soundalikes" like Marge's sisters, etc.

[nattaylor]

Never thought about that either, but definitely seems like a sign of the times. The writers grew up in the 80s(?) and were writing in the 90s. Many of those occupations (CEO, bartender, principal, clown, police chief, news anchor, etc) were predominantly male. [citation needed]

Edit: Not so sure about my conclusions, as it seems that women made up about ~40% of the US Labor Force by 1990 [0] That article doesn't go into women's roles/titles though.

[0] - http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2009/10/01/the-harried-life-o...