Photo: Michael Becker/FOX
Still shocked by last night’s American Idol elimination? So is Tom Hanks! But maybe we should have seen this coming, since Idol hasn’t been friendly to female contestants for a couple of years running now: Rarely does more than one woman make it into the top five, and over the last five seasons, only one female contestant has won the whole shebang. So what’s to blame? Is it the fault of the too-mild judges (though to be fair, women didn’t fare that well under Simon Cowell’s recent tenure, either)? Has the influx of votes via text and Facebook skewed things against women? Or are girls simply refusing to support a female front-runner?