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Do Women Count?
Yesterday, after I made some snarky comment, a friend asked me if I was Eeyore. The truth is, I'm a mash-up of Eeyore and Tigger. Tigger bounces up and down gleefully whenever I talk about gay rights. But today I'm talking about the ladies again, so get ready for Eeyore.
The online magazine VIDA just released its count of female::male bylines in influential literary and political outlets—"thought leader" magazines, as they're called. The numbers are absolutely dismal. In The New Yorker and The Atlantic, there are nearly three male bylines to one female. In The New Republic, the byline ratio is four to one. In Harper's, it's five to one.
VIDA's introduction and its press release say nice cheerful things, like, "But we at VIDA aren’t discouraged by this fact—we know that significant cultural change takes time."
But time isn't making significant changes. Well, okay, in 2005, the Columbia Journalism Review found that the byline ratio in The New Yorker was 3.5 to one, and in The Atlantic it was six to one, so yes, things have inched up a bit. (In The Atlantic, though, consider which women are writing. As Caryl Rivers notes in her dead-on analysis called "The Atlantic's Woman Problem," "The leitmotif of much of what the Atlantic publishes about women is that female gains are dangerous—to children, to families, to marriages, to themselves, and to men." I have a great editor at The Atlantic Online who has assigned me some very interesting stories. But she's female—and outnumbered.) But women actually make up more than 50 percent of English literature and journalism school graduates. We're not talking about Larry Summers' leaky science pipeline here. We're talking about the subject at which girls are, stereotypically, supposed to be outstanding, and where they concentrate in high numbers: reading and writing.
The online magazine VIDA just released its count of female::male bylines in influential literary and political outlets—"thought leader" magazines, as they're called. The numbers are absolutely dismal. In The New Yorker and The Atlantic, there are nearly three male bylines to one female. In The New Republic, the byline ratio is four to one. In Harper's, it's five to one.
VIDA's introduction and its press release say nice cheerful things, like, "But we at VIDA aren’t discouraged by this fact—we know that significant cultural change takes time."
But time isn't making significant changes. Well, okay, in 2005, the Columbia Journalism Review found that the byline ratio in The New Yorker was 3.5 to one, and in The Atlantic it was six to one, so yes, things have inched up a bit. (In The Atlantic, though, consider which women are writing. As Caryl Rivers notes in her dead-on analysis called "The Atlantic's Woman Problem," "The leitmotif of much of what the Atlantic publishes about women is that female gains are dangerous—to children, to families, to marriages, to themselves, and to men." I have a great editor at The Atlantic Online who has assigned me some very interesting stories. But she's female—and outnumbered.) But women actually make up more than 50 percent of English literature and journalism school graduates. We're not talking about Larry Summers' leaky science pipeline here. We're talking about the subject at which girls are, stereotypically, supposed to be outstanding, and where they concentrate in high numbers: reading and writing.
http://prospect.org/article/do-women-count