Why It’s Harder for a Woman to Win Survivor

If recent Survivor seasons have proved anything, there seems to be issues that women keep having with winning the game in recent seasons. A woman has not won since Game Changers and a new player that was a woman who won her first time playing was back in Kaoh Rong. It is hard to know for sure why this could be, but is still worth exploring nonetheless.

The simplest explanation is that this is gender bias causing the problem. But is that true? One would think that it would have to be. Men get rewarded for playing a ruthless game while women are shunned for doing the same thing. It has been quite a while since someone like Vecepia could dominate the way she did and get a win based on her game play. While Sarah was like that when she won, why has no one else been able to do that since?

There was once a time when there were more women winners than male winners. I forget offhand what the current proportion is (if I’m using the right word). But there have clearly been more men who won this game. Of course, this does make you wonder if there have been unfair advantages that might be in men’s favor somehow, perhaps intentionally or otherwise.

The gender balance of a season is normally equal or close to it. But then there are times when they do a one returnee per tribe season and only one of those returnees thus far has been a woman. There was a plan once to put three women in a season again with one of them, Stephenie, returning this way for a second time. But this didn’t wind up happening.

Still, in at least Philippines, there were more new women playing that season then new men and one of those new women won the game. The same can be said about South Pacific where a new woman beat all the other players, including the two returning men.

Women can still be vicious players and rewarded for it. In Micronesia, women dominated the game and made the men look like fools. Sandra won the game twice by manipulating others and at least once getting the votes of those she didn’t help.

This can make you wonder, though: what changed? At what point did it become more difficult for the women in the game of Survivor to beat the men? Well, advantages haven’t helped as a lot of them keep being found by men over and over. The blunders of some men don’t prevent others from doing well themselves in the game. Women can often be overlooked as players despite playing good games for the most part overall.

The other aspect as to why women aren’t winning recently is because people know that they can and would win so they are voted out so this doesn’t happen. Their likability keeps them for making it to the end while those who don’t have as big a chance at winning are kept against the men who are more likely to win instead of those women.

Honestly, even though Lillian in Pearl Islands was facing another woman at the end, what kept her from winning is what prevented other women before and after her from doing that as well. They didn’t like her deceptive game play when they felt that she should not win as a result.

And there’s really not much else to say about this unfortunate trend in Survivor. There are numerous factors that prevent women from doing as well as men, at least in recent seasons. Hopefully these issues can be fixed somehow without changing the game too much if we are lucky enough to have this show return to the airwaves in the future. After the issues of the last two seasons, one can only hope that there will be more done to prevent issues while staying fair to everyone. We don’t want that great discussion that Sarah and Jeff had to not change anything. For now, this is Adam Decker, signing off.