In addition to that, I find it disturbing that people in our society are so obsessed with personal wealth.

I seem to recall that they do that with their 400 list which is mostly men as well. I'm just thankful they didn't print who designs their clothes and does their hair.

Because no matter what you do you are NOTHING without a man/partner and kids.

I don't see the point here. This seems to me to be an important factor that we sometimes overlook while feministing. A woman can bear children. Plain and simple. Why wouldn't someone being acknowledged nationwide (for whatever reason) be proud of who they are by admitting that they did in fact manage to get to where they are today AND raised 1, 2, 3 etc. children. On that note, women who marry should also be proud of their husbands. I don't see anything sexist about claiming your family. If it's a success story, the whole family most likely contributed to (1) woman's success.

I clicked the link over to the Celebrity 100 and randomly clicked on two celebrities, Tom Cruise and Oprah.

Tom is listed as #1, meaning, presumably, he's the most powerful celebrity. Orpah is #3. Yet Tom's paycheck is listed as 67 mil, while Oprah laps him about three and a half times, at 225 mil.

Interesting that the richer of the two is "less powerful"... couldn't possibly have anything to do with her being an African-American woman, of course.

The Law Fairy Interesting that the richer of the two is "less powerful"... couldn't possibly have anything to do with her being an African-American woman, of course.

But generating headlines isn't enough to solidify your standing in Hollywood. A fat paycheck won't do it, either. Only a combination of earnings and sizzle will land a celebrity a coveted spot on our Celebrity 100 list of the most powerful names in the business.

To generate the list, we used a combination of factors including income, Web references as calculated by Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ), press clips as compiled by Lexis/Nexis, TV/radio mentions from Factiva and the number of times a celebrity's face has appeared on the cover of 26 major consumer magazines. Earnings estimates are for June 2005 to June 2006 and are dollars earned solely from entertainment income. Management, agent and attorney fees have not been deducted.

maz:

Um, yes. That was my point (though I could have made it better). Why do you suppose it is that a couch-jumping cult member privileged white male who lambasts women for taking positive steps to keep them and their children safe from real mental illnesses, gets better press coverage than one of the most intelligent and compassionate women in showbizness?

Because of the google and the way they did their rating? Quick google searches provide this as the following:

Results 1 - 10 of about 12,200,000 for tom cruise. (0.05 seconds)
Results 1 - 10 of about 2,770,000 for oprah winfrey [definition]. (0.30 seconds)

There's a ten million difference in those numbers there. I'd assume he made more of a jack ass of himself over the year than she did therefore boosting him above her in the way they ranked celebrities.

maz, this methodology, alone, doesn't make sense to me. It seems that if someone is getting millions of google hits because people dislike him, that should SUBTRACT from his power. So if that factors in heavily, and it's a pure numbers game, then it's not a very good measure of power.

I mean, if they're doing things that way, Mel Gibson should almost certainly be on the list. And the only Mel I see is Brooks.

The only way to figure this out is to contact the editors and find out the algorithm they used in calculating who got what number.

Does anything in celebrity make any sense? Not from what I can see. They're just people like everyone else out there only their lives are on display twenty four hours a day for the entire world to watch.

Just from the information that they did include in the article it would lead me to believe that your initial post was wrong. It appears that gender, ethnicity or any other "grouping" detail besides celebrity was considered on this list.

Oh my god. They counted the Olsen Twins as ONE person. That struck me as weird and bad.

What really bothered me about the list was how the networth falls almost exponentially. The difference between number 1 and number 4 is 100%. Between number 1 and number 20 there's over a 1000% difference. I guess to me, looking at the numbers, it means that there aren't that many very rich women in entertainment. I wish there were a similar list of the men in entertainment.