Profession

On my first run-through of the list I noticed that most of the people listed were either politicians, leaders, or government officials of some sort. This isn't too surprising because it's usually these people who have the most power.

One thing that was surprising though was the prevalence of tech company CEOs. There's talk of the Silicon Valley bubble, and I believe this really speaks to it. It's great that companies like Facebook (Mark Zuckerberg) and Google (Sundar Pichai) are trying bring about greater internet access in the world, but do the CEOs of Uber (Travis Kalanick) and Oculus (Palmer Luckey) affect anybody but the most privileged? I'll also use this moment to mention that all four tech CEOs are male, no Marissa Mayer?

We can also see which government officials TIME decided to include:

We have 12 heads of state, almost half of whom are from the Middle East. We almost have the United Nations Security Council (sorry David Cameron!) Note that countries not the United States have no politicians mentioned besides their leader (sorry Jeremy Corbyn!)

Nationality

We can also examine the candidates by continent (I let the Middle East be its own continent). There is one candidate from the entirety of Africa, and none from South America (unless you count Pope Francis, which I won't). Crazy, huh?

The other easy split is by nationality. This list is decidedly American. More specifically, 39 out of 58 candidates are from the United States. That's almost double the rest of the world. We'll talk about who these Americans are later, but for now, let's talk about the non-Americans, and what it takes for them to get on the TIME list.

It's fairly diverse (though an emphasis on government), but what we really miss are those involved in sports and tech.

Race and Gender

Both race and gender are social constructions (more or less), but identifying them is important in seeing our own biases. I assigned each person only one race for ease in analysis, so please let me know if you feel that someone's race is incorrect.

The biggest problem I see is that there are several African-American women (great!), but there is only one Asian woman (Malala Yousafzai). There are no African women. There are no Latinas. I have a few suggestions (and there are a ton out there): Dilma Rousseff, the President of Brazil, or Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese opposition leader. It's been a dude or a group since 1986!

There are 21 women, out of 58 candidates. That's still only about one-third. Out of these, let's compare their nationality:

So we have Angela Merkel from Germany and Adele and J.K. Rowling from the United Kingdom, all three of whom are white.

But we should also examine the American women on the list, of which there are 17 total.

We can also see their professions:

The two women who play sports are the only people from the sports world on TIME's list (and they both happen to be from the United States).

American Politicians

Now we get to the good stuff: how many of these people are somehow related to the 2016 United States Presidential race? There are eight US presidential candidates in this list, which is about 13.8% of TIME's list. The presidential candidates (emphasis on the word candidate) include such world-changers as Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina. Now if we add people who were brought to national attention by these presidential candidates or are deeply involved (and I recognize that a few were already famous before, for other reasons), Kim Davis, Megyn Kelly, Jorge Ramos, Cecile Richards, and Charles and David Koch, the number rises to 13. That's almost one-fifth of all of TIME's candidates. This is also half of all government-related TIME candidates. Out of all Americans:

And all this before any primary - their name recognition problems must not be as bad as they seem!

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