23,000 Marvel and DC characters introduced over 74 years. About 24% were female. That number was 11% in the 1940s.

FiveThirtyEight extracted data on every character from the Marvel Wikia and DC Wikia databases — 16,376 Marvel characters and 6,896 DC characters introduced between 1939 and 2013. Each character was tagged with sex, alignment (Good/Bad/Neutral), and a running appearance count.

The gender breakdown is not equal. Marvel is 23.4% female; DC is 28.5%. But the direction of change is clear: female representation has tripled from its Golden Age low.

The data also challenges a common assumption: that female characters are written as villains more often. The numbers show the opposite. At DC, 46.5% of male characters are coded as Bad/Villain — against 30.4% of females. At Marvel the gap is similar: 45.9% of males versus 25.4% of females.

Villains are disproportionately male. Female characters are more likely to be heroes.

Appearances tell a third story. Among the top 20 characters by total appearances (1939-2013), only two are female: Susan Storm (rank 14, 1,713 appearances) and Storm / Ororo Munroe (rank 17, 1,512). Spider-Man leads with 4,043 appearances. The most-seen female character has fewer appearances than the 13th-ranked male.

A note on this data. The dataset covers characters introduced through 2013 — newer characters (Ms. Marvel/Kamala Khan, 2013; America Chavez, 2011; Miles Morales, 2011) appear at the edge or just beyond the dataset's scope. The underlying Wikia databases are crowd-sourced and may contain errors in appearance counts or first-appearance years. This dataset is standard for data journalism features but should not be treated as a primary publisher source.