When Georgetown’s own Liana Wallace (MSB ’23) cast her vote for fellow castaway Erika Casupanan to take home the million dollars on Season 41 (2021) of Survivor, she helped break a six-season dry spell of women winners, marking a turning point in the franchise.
Season 41—the beginning of Survivor’s “New Era”—was the first to switch from 39 days of competition to 26 and the first to feature a 50% BIPOC cast after the implementation of the CBS Diversity Initiative. While these groundbreaking changes were immediately apparent, another important shift has only revealed itself with time: in the New Era, women are thriving.
Over the past 8 seasons (Survivor wrapped its 48th season earlier this month), women have found more immunity idols—game tokens granting the wielder the opportunity to nullify any votes played on them during tribal council—and have received more jury votes than ever before in Survivor history. Not to mention that, after a 15 season stretch with only 3 women winners, women are finally winning the show again: five of the past eight seasons were won by women.
While men and women won Survivor at an even rate during the first 25 seasons (2000-2012)—men won 13 of these early seasons and women won 12—seasons 26 through 40 (2013-2020) saw a dramatic drop-off in women winners viewers noticed but couldn’t explain.
Moreover, several seasons during this era became infamous for their male contestants’ misogyny. Season 30 saw an onslaught of sexist rhetoric. Worse yet, Dan Spilo was removed from Season 39 for inappropriate touching on day 36 of 39—despite contestant Kellee Kim voicing her concerns about his behavior beginning on day 2—causing production to reconcile with the show’s inadequate institutional support for women.
Thankfully, after this bleak period in the show’s history, women are finally flourishing again in the New Era—in part thanks to the CBS Diversity Initiative and changing attitudes towards women players.
Today, on May 31st, Survivor celebrates its 25th anniversary. Over the past two and a half decades, the beloved reality television behemoth has evolved substantially, but one facet has remained consistent: Survivor, as a microcosm for the real world that reflects social dynamics of everyday life, is a highly gendered game from top to bottom.
For those who might be unfamiliar, Survivor is a reality competition show in which contestants are divided into tribes and forced to endure both the elements and one another while battling for a million-dollar prize. In the early phase of the game, tribes go head-to-head in a series of physical and puzzle-based challenges in hopes of avoiding tribal council, a ceremony in which all attendees must write down the name of someone in the tribe whom they would like to eliminate. Eventually, once numbers have dwindled, the tribes merge in a turning point called, fittingly, the Merge. From there on out, challenges become individual, and winners are guaranteed safety from being voted out at tribal council that night. Once two or three players remain, they attend Final Tribal Council. There, finalists must defend their gameplay to a jury of eliminated players in hopes that they will receive the prize money and the title of Sole Survivor.
When playing Survivor, the fate of your game is entirely dependent on how your peers perceive you: other contestants choose when you go home and, if you are savvy enough to make it to the end, whether or not your gameplay is ultimately deserving of a million bucks. Thus, winning Survivor is not just a matter of playing the game to the best of your abilities, but playing a game perfectly catered to the preferences of the people who will end up on the jury.
On one hand, this dependence on social perception is liberating—if you can survive the vote and gain the respect of the jury, you can win. There is no cookie-cutter way to play. Over the past 48 seasons, winners have implemented a wide range of strategies, which is part of the reason why the show remains so compelling even after 25 years on the air.
On the other hand, this dependence on social perceptions can prove detrimental when biases relating to race, age, and gender pollute the game. Maryanne Oketch, winner of Season 42, said it best during her season: “Yes, we all technically have a one in 18 shot for the million, but because we all come with our burdens and we all come with our privileges, that one in 18 might be bigger or smaller for some people and that sucks.”
In recent years, gender and racial inequalities within Survivor have become a topic of academic investigation. Dr. Erin O’Mara Kunz, director of the Experimental Psychology Master’s program at the University of Dayton, Ohio, is one professor bringing the show into the classroom. After watching the show for two decades, she began teaching a course called The Social Psychology of Survivor this past fall.
In 2023, Dr. Kunz published a research paper entitled “Surviving Racism & Sexism: What Votes in the Television Program Survivor Reveal About Discrimination” where she assessed voting biases within the first 40 seasons of the show. During her research, Kunz discovered that among tribes that featured both male and female contestants, women were 72% more likely to be voted out first. Notably, between Seasons 26 and 40, 10 of the 15 first boots were women, meaning women were twice as likely to be voted out first compared to their male counterparts.
She also discovered data suggesting bias against BIPOC contestants. Among tribes with diverse racial compositions, contestants of color were 59% more likely to be voted out of their tribes first. While her paper did not address the intersection between race and gender directly, the combination of these two findings suggests that women of color are more likely to face an uphill battle on the show, especially when it comes to surviving the first few votes.
This bias typically stems from stereotypes around women’s physical capabilities. In the early stages of the game, players often operate under the mindset that the best way to keep the tribe “strong” and to avoid going to tribal council is to eliminate players who do not perform well in the immunity challenges. Operating under this strength-obsessed mentality usually causes contestants to target the women in their tribe before the men.
Eventually, the tables tend to turn: physical strength is usually a targeted attribute within the game once challenges switch from communal to individual in the wake of the Merge. Still, this pervasive perception that women are weaker than men means that women are unfairly picked off before they even have the chance to fully assert their strengths.
Historically, women are also less likely to find hidden immunity idols. Though immunity idols were first introduced into the show on Season 11, it took until Season 16 for a woman, Amanda Kimmel, to find one. Finding idols doesn’t just help players survive the vote—it also helps them bolster their resumes for the jury. For example, the winners of seasons 15, 14, and 13—three men, mind you—all found idols. According to a spreadsheet compiled by Jeff Pittman of True Dork Times, only 34% (56/167) of immunity idols ever found on Survivor have been found by women.
Luckily, things are slowly beginning to change on this front. Before season 41, only 29.8% (39/131) of idols had been found by women. However, in the New Era, women have found 47.2% (17/36) of the idols in the game.
Kunz believes that gender roles at camp might be the cause for why women find idols at a lesser rate than men.
“Women are at the fire all the time,” Kunz said in an interview with the Voice. “They’re not able to disappear as quietly as men seem to be.”
On the other hand, two-time contestant Kassandra McQuillen—an attorney who also teaches a course on Survivor at Texas Tech—believes that the predominantly male production crew might play a role.
“The only opportunity to find an idol, truly, is when you’re alone with a camera person, which is when you’re going to and from a walk,” McQuillen told the Voice. “Now, if you’re walking with two 35-year-old guys and you’re a 42-year-old woman, are they going to help you find an idol? No, right? But if you’re bro-ing down with a fireman or a pilot or a guy’s guy, they’ll tell you where the idol is. They’ll point the camera there.”
From McQuillen’s perspective, this gender disparity on the production side doesn’t just impact women’s ability to find idols—it disrupts their ability to play the game comfortably.
“You go to change your tampon and there’s a male camera crew right there,” McQuillen said. “You know they’re not filming it, but you’re not really alone out there, and that’s a weird thing to carry for a lot of people.”
Without feeling comfortable on the island—or, more accurately, on set—how can women feel empowered to play the game to the best of their abilities? They can’t, McQuillen argues.
“Why don’t we make it so there’s 300 women running the show, and let’s see how the story gets crafted differently?” McQuillen said. “Let’s see how many women find idols. Let’s see how much confidence that instills in women, realizing we have friends producing.”
Kassandra McQuillen on Survivor: Cagayan (2013). Courtesy of CBS.
Since her time on Survivor: Cagayan (Season 28) and Survivor: Second Chance (Season 31), McQuillen has been outspoken about the difficulties of competing as a woman. During taping, other contestants regularly used sexist rhetoric to undermine her gameplay—despite its striking similarities to that season’s male winner. For example, after she ensured a vote didn’t go his way, contestant Spencer Bledsoe remarked that McQuillen “go[es] wherever her estrogen takes her, not where her brain takes her.”
“Nobody was mad at Spencer at the time about that,” McQuillen said. “They were like, ‘poor little Spencer.’ He can call me a brain dead weasel after I beat him at a puzzle he had a 35-minute head start on and I’m still the bad guy.”
This misogyny continued to follow McQuillen when she returned home.
“Initially when I played I got death threats,” McQuillen said. “I flipped on Sarah Lacina, and people called my office and told me they were going to kill me and my family. People would follow me in a parking lot at the grocery store with my five year old kid and tell me I was a bitch because I played Survivor.”
Now, when teaching her Survivor course, she makes a point to share the influx of hostility she received on social media, calling on students around the room to read her hate comments out loud.
“On Veterans Day, I posted a picture of me when I was like 19 in the military, and people wrote, bitch, cunt, whore, all those things,” McQuillen said. “I decided to leave [the app] and never touch it again.”
That was back in 2018. Recently, however, her daughter—now a junior in high school—came across her mother’s profile when she first downloaded Instagram and was startled by the comments she found.
“She said, ‘Why don’t you delete this?’ and I said, ‘Because I want people to remember,’” McQuillen said.
Unfortunately, McQuillen’s story of harassment is nothing new. Contestants, particularly women, have been on the receiving end of vitriolic comments since the show’s inception. For proof, look no further than Jerri Manthey who competed on the show’s second season, Survivor: The Australian Outback.
“She was seen as such a horrible person, like the original Black Widow,” Professor Hartley Jafine—who teaches a Survivor course at McMaster University—told the Voice. “All she did was form an alliance.”
At the end of April, Manthey spoke about her unfair portrayal on the show with two-time Survivor contestant Rob Cesternino on his podcast.
“Someone just came up to me yesterday at a winery—I live in Napa Valley now—and he’s like ‘Oh, it’s Jerri! The villain! I’ll always remember you as the villain—you’re so good at being a villain,’” Manthey said. “And I said ‘Okay, I’m going to ask you a question. Name one thing I did that was villainous.’ He couldn’t answer me.”
When Cesterino asked Manthey why she believed she was given this exaggerated, devious characterization, she had the following response:
“I mean, a short answer to that is I was a woman, so I was an easy target to be villainized,” Manthey said.
Another contestant who received an unflattering edit was J’Tia Hart, a nuclear engineer who competed alongside McQuillen on Survivor: Cagayan.
For most viewers, hearing the name “J’Tia” prompts one image: that of her dumping her tribe’s rice on the fire in a moment of anger. While Hart has owned that moment as admittedly “outrageous,” she has taken rightful issue with other elements of her portrayal on the show—namely the extrapolation that her performance on Survivor indicates that she is somehow incapable of fulfilling her job outside of the game. In particular, longtime host Jeff Probst’s comments in a pre-season interview with Entertainment Weekly left a sour taste in her mouth.
“J’Tia is a nuclear engineer and wears a shirt that says ‘I love nerds,’ and I’m not sure anyone’s gonna feel too comfortable about our future knowing that J’Tia is a nuclear engineer,” said Probst.
As Hart detailed in an interview with E! News, her reductive depiction was reflective of a larger pattern of Black Survivor contestants being treated dismissively on the show.
“It’s not only having Black people there, but telling the broadness of their stories,” Hart told E! News. “So on Survivor, you have archetypes. You have the beauty, the nerd, the strategic mastermind, the challenge beast, and Black people get stereotyped into a very small, narrow broadband. It’s like the lazy, crazy side-chick or the workhorse. There are very few Black people who break that mold.”
Acting upon her desire for greater BIPOC visibility, J’Tia Hart collaborated with other Black Survivor alums to create the Soul Survivors Organization, an organization which advocates for better representations of contestants of color. Following the killing of George Floyd in 2020, they started a petition that called for CBS to implement initiatives to combat systemic racism in Survivor’s construction. Among the list of action items, the petition requested that CBS “equitably compensate and hire more BIPOC in all parts of production,” “give BIPOC equitable screen time,” and “actively support BIPOC cast” by providing them with “mental health resources specifically geared to helping them navigate the Survivor experience as BIPOC.” Additionally, the petition requested that future Survivor casts feature a minimum of 30% BIPOC contestants.
Receiving thousands of signatures, the Soul Survivor petition led to CBS pledging in Nov. 2020 that, among other changes, 50% of their unscripted television casts would be composed of people of color moving forward.
Professor Jafine believes this initiative might be contributing to the recent uptick in women winners, because women who make it to the end can now plead their cases to more diverse juries.
“I think when you have a more diverse cast, you have people who have experienced oppression, have experienced misogyny, who have experienced discrimination in all forms,” Jafine said. “And I think, even if they do not identify as a woman, they can recognize what it’s like to possibly be in a minority group or in a group that’s often unheard.”
Additionally, Dr. Kunz believes the increase in BIPOC women on Survivor might explain why women are winning more in recent years.
“If you look at voting, for example, women of color vote for women’s interests a lot more than white women do,” Dr. Erin O’Mara Kunz said. “And so if you think of who’s a girl’s girl, I think women of color tend to be supportive of women and women’s initiatives more than white women are.”
Throughout much of the show’s history, even when women have made it to Final Tribal Council, their gameplay has been undervalued compared to their male competitors. According to Dr. Kunz’s research, across the first 40 seasons, women were 63% less likely to clinch the win if they were sitting next to a man at Final Tribal Council.
Between Season 26 and Season 40, women received only around 20% of total jury votes. Furthermore, for four seasons in a row between Season 36 and 39, the only woman to make it to Final Tribal Council received zero votes.
However, the tides are beginning to turn. Over the past eight completed seasons, 54.7% of the total jury votes cast have been for a woman to win the game. In addition to the impacts of the Diversity Initiative, Kunz believes the type of gameplay valued by jurors is also changing to the benefit of female contestants.
“The kind of game that women play is much more social, it’s much more relational,” Kunz said. “And that, ultimately, is why I think women are doing better now, because I think there’s more of an appreciation and respect for that kind of gameplay.”
On Survivor, every juror evaluates “win-worthy” gameplay differently. Though all jurors are asked to consider a finalist’s abilities to outwit, outplay, and outlast their competitors, each voter weighs these factors differently when casting their ballot. Therefore, what playing the “best” game entails must be continually defined by each contestant season after season.
The malleability of what being a worthy winner means is a double-edged sword: yes, anyone can win, but anyone’s win can also be discredited. For many female contestants, this means that even when they do win the title of Sole Survivor, their gameplay is retroactively undermined by viewers.
Sandra Diaz-Twine on Survivor: Pearl Islands (2003). Courtesy of Robert Voets and CBS.
For instance, though Sandra Diaz-Twine has won the show twice and is commonly referred to as the “Queen” of Survivor, she is still often the subject of heated debates over whether or not she “deserved” her wins.
Diaz-Twine’s gameplay is unique in its simplicity and effectiveness. She has never used an immunity idol and has never been a formidable opponent in the immunity challenges. Instead, she secured both of her wins with her social prowess. For her, the secret to winning a show like Survivor is ultimately rather clear-cut: be likable enough to have people want to give you a million dollars.
“For me, the key to my success was always a social game, being an ear, a shoulder to cry on,” Diaz-Twine said in an interview with the Voice. “I’ll listen to whatever you have to say. People say it all the time—one day on Survivor feels like a week, and it’s the honest truth. So when people are miserable, cold, wet, hungry, and they’re missing home, you want to be that comfort. You want to be that person that they come and talk to.”
Erika Casupanan’s win on Survivor 41 has been similarly criticized online for its lowkey nature—something which Liana Wallace, who competed alongside her, wants to push back on.
“I’m so proud of her for winning the show, and I just want to give her her flowers,” Wallace said. “Because I feel like so many people are like, ‘Oh, like, did she really deserve that?’ I think that’s a huge issue, especially with women of color.”
This past season, gendered questions of what it means to be a “worthy” player emerged once again when contestant David Kinne founded an alliance (mainly composed of men) predominantly on the basis of physical strength and challenge aptitude. Throughout Season 48, Kinne delivered several interesting comments which illuminated the type of gameplay he believes to be deserving of a million dollars.
“Let’s have a season where we put someone on the podium that deserves to be there,” Kinne said on episode 6. “I want the challenge guys to win this season, man.”
During our conversation, Sandra Diaz-Twine shared her curiosity about Kinne’s comments.
“You know how David said ‘I want whoever wins to deserve it’—what does that mean?” Diaz-Twine said. “Who does he feel has won throughout the last 47 seasons that didn’t deserve it?”
On Survivor, women are critiqued for playing like women, but also for playing like men. When women execute the kind of cutthroat strategies men are praised for, they are not applauded—they are demonized. Sarah Lacina, winner of Season 34, described this phenomenon during her last tribal council on Season 40.
“If a woman in this game lies or cheats or steals, then she’s fake and phony and a bitch,” Lacina said. “If a guy does it, it’s good gameplay. If a guy does it, they’re a stud. What it is, it’s a gender bias, and it holds me back, it holds other women back from playing the game the way we should be allowed to play the game.”
Professor Jafine echoed Lacina’s words.
“Players at the Final Tribal Council are judged very differently based on the bodies that they’re in,” Jafine said. “If you’re a religious mom, you’re held to a different standard than if you are a 21-year old male bartender.”
Still, Jafine remains hopeful about the New Era. In his view, attitudes about how women are “supposed” to play Survivor are slowly but surely evolving.
“If Jerri played the game now, she’d be a hero,” Jafine said. “She’d be loved in the same way that Kass in a modern 2025 context would also be loved. But at the time that they played, there was this perception of, like, a woman can’t lie—that is seen as unfathomable, that is seen as so dirty.”
Turns out, Jafine was right about McQuillen. In Nov. 2020, six years after her debut season first aired, Survivor: Cagayan was rereleased on Netflix and her edit did in fact receive considerably more kindness from fans.
“I got a call from my casting person, and she said, ‘Kass, I want to tell you, you’re the most referenced female player young professional women say they would play like now,’” McQuillen said.
As McQuillen’s story illustrates, times are changing on Survivor, and, personally, I couldn’t be happier. From the perspective of an avid Survivor fan who first began watching during the dark days of Season 30, seeing women like Erika Casupanan, Maryanne Oketch, Dee Valladares, Kenzie Petty, and Rachel LaMont thrive in the New Era has felt like a breath of fresh air. Looking forward, it is my sincere hope that, in this riveting chess game of social politics, the future women of Survivor will continue to carry on the torch—despite those who will continue trying to snuff it.
