Recently, I was asked a really interesting question: What’s more dangerous to be in the United States? A female teacher, or female soldier? (Thank you @punkrockmxfrizzle for the question and @inandoutofspaceandtime for suggestions on colours for the graph)
After digging through nearly 70 years of data on both, it seems the answer is a bit mixed.
But first, a quick series of caveats:
It’s worth noting that on average, year over year, there are 10x as many female teachers as servicewomen.
In this case, Soldier/Servicewoman is defined as any individual born as female, who entered into the uniformed service. Since laws around allowing women to be in “front-line” operations have varied over the decades, it makes it an impractical comparison. Therefore, any woman who died as a result of enemy fire from the Korean War to Syria are being counted, with suicides or “blue-on-blue” being excluded.
Similarly for teachers, suicides are not being counted, and school shootings are defined as any act of violence, involving a firearm, within school hours or during school sponsored events that resulted in a fatality, whether accidental or by design. That being said, shootings that immediately preceded a school shooting that was not directly connected did not count. For example, if a female teacher was shot on the way to school, but no other action occured, that death was excluded. However, if an individual shot a female school teacher and killed her, and then proceeded to shoot up the school she taught at, she would be considered part of that fatality cohort. Okay, so with that out of the way, here’s the stats:
Year over year until the War on Terror Trilogy (Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria), Teachers suffered the most absolute fatalities, as well as year-by-year comparative fatalities per ratio.
That being said, this is mostly because servicewomen, most years, did not suffer a fatality.However, taken as a cohort (year-over-year risk ratio), Servicewomen on average had around a 12x higher risk of fatality than female teachers
Not fun fact: During the period of 2001-2014, Female Soldiers by percentage had a higher risk of being a causality (14.5%) than their male counterparts (12.5%).
In terms of school shootings, Female Teachers are actually in the lowest fatality bracket, with Male Teachers, Female Students, Male Students and then Female Teachers being the order of victims by number. Until roughly the 1980′s, the perpetrators were roughly tied as male and female students, then male teachers, then female teachers. After the 1980′s, this shifted to primarily male students, with the other three cohorts roughly remaining tied.
IT WAS HARD AS FUCK TO FIND FEMALE SOLDIER FATALITY STATISTICS. It is an ABSOLUTE dishonor to their memories that their names, stories, and numbers are so hard to find. In many cases, their deaths were due to enemy fire (or IED) while these people were trying to save others or prevent them harm. Stitching together personal web-pages and some vague congressional statistics data is not the way we should have to try to remember these soldiers. They died in service to their country. We should act like it.
It’s some bullshit this even has to be a comparative question. We’re talking people in fucking WAR ZONES and people who are trusted to teach our kids. And yet, and YET, that’s not a terribly disproportionate graph.
This graph and analysis was performed using R, ggplot2 and the Wes Anderson Color Pallete package. If there are any follow-up questions, source requests, or ideas on what should be analyzed next, please feel free to toss it in the notes or PM me.
