Women in Publishing
Update: We are bumping this back to the top of the page because the conversation is so active.
The count is in. VIDA has a breakdown of women publishing in 2010. Across the board women are being published less than men and fewer books by women are being reviewed than books by men.
What’s not addressed is how many women submit to Tin House for example, which published three times as many men as women. If only a quarter of the submissions are from women then that would make sense and the problem would be encouraging women to submit their fiction. If, on the other hand, the same number of women are submitting manuscripts as men, then the problem could be editorial.
In the opening of the article Amy King states, “We know women write. We know women read. It’s time to begin asking why the 2010 numbers don’t reflect those facts with any equity.” But there’s a lot of presumption in that statement, and the statements that follow. Do women write as much as men? And probably more importantly, Do they submit their work to literary journals? Certainly in terms of books reviewed the percentage of literary books published by women to men would be the most important statistic. As much effort as was put into compiling this data one imagines the data on books published could certainly be found, even if it had to be limited to a dozen presses just so we would have an idea.
We love you VIDA, but we want a little more.
Update
I should have chosen my words more carefully. It’s fairly obvious that women write as much as men. I don’t know why I was so glib, so glib, in fact I didn’t remember writing that line. Still, there is important data missing from VIDA’s article. Some of it is difficult to find, like number of women submitting work. Some of it is not that hard, like percentage of books published by women (which I believe is important if we’re going to talk about books reviewed). I’m surprised still that some people have taken my comments to mean we’re not on VIDA’s side. VIDA’s data shows an important problem that needs to be addressed. More data will enrich the conversation and hopefully help point us in a direction of positive change.
February 2nd, 2011 at 12:16 pm
Word.
Unless it’s paired with the gender numbers of overall submissions/published books, I don’t know exactly what we should take away from these graphs. Shouldn’t we have ALL the numbers (even from a handful of places, like you said) before we get up in arms?
February 2nd, 2011 at 12:18 pm
I have to agree we need more numbers to make a real judgement where the problems lie.
I’ve worked at an editor for several literary magazines and have talked about this issue with both male and female editors. All agree that men submit far more often than women, for whatever reasons. Even at magazines where the editors are female and that are known for publishing women writers, men submit more. Anecdotally, my male writer friends also submit far more regularly and exhaustively than my female writer friends.
I won’t presume to explain this, but I think it probably has a lot to do with the numbers.
February 2nd, 2011 at 12:22 pm
I think these numbers are an argument, at the very least, for asking people for work rather than relying on submissions to come in. The numbers on the reviews are the least excusable, I think, because more controllable–if you want parity, you can make it happen if you put the work in. I know the last time they ran our numbers we were okay on the review side, though not perfect, and I have no idea how that’s changed in the months since then, because I haven’t tracked even the poetry side, much less the reviews as a whole. But I know the last time I looked at our poetry reviews, we were skewed toward women both as reviewers and as authors, and that happened without any real effort on my part, so I think that if I really wanted to make sure there was parity, it would be possible to get at least close.
February 2nd, 2011 at 12:27 pm
I actually think that these numbers, the numbers of literary books published by women compared to men, would not be that hard to come by. Just choose ten literary presses and look at their releases for fall 2010. There’s no reason not to have these numbers. Obviously, sexism is at work, but it might not be the editors, which is what this article seems to be hinting at. If 75% of literary books are published by men (and I’m not saying they are) then it would make sense that 75% of books reviewed were written by men.
If publications are getting fewer submissions from women than it would make sense they publish fewer. If that’s the case we should take actions to encourage women to submit more. That’s the whole genesis of the Funny Women column. Elissa found out that fewer women were submitting comedy pieces than men and she wanted to encourage more humor submissions from women.
I guess I just think it seems a little irresponsible not to have at least some of those numbers as part of this essay since those numbers are so important for finding a solution other than boycotting Tin House.
February 2nd, 2011 at 12:32 pm
These graphs are so stark, I think they say something regardless of the relative number of books published by men and women. The gap just can’t be that big. But I wish we had all the numbers, too. Why not start with enrollment in MFA programs? What is the balance there? Then books published by the publishing houses, then books reviewed. My guess is that there is some attrition with each step (just as in academia, women are more often derailed by childrearing), but that the numbers change most dramatically at the last step.
Every time this argument is raised, the response is: What sense does it make unless we have all the numbers? I think it’s a red herring. But let’s get all the numbers and keep talking.
February 2nd, 2011 at 12:32 pm
Brian,
That still assumes that women are as likely to say “yes” to solicitations as men are. That hasn’t been my experience or the experience of other editors I’ve talked to.
February 2nd, 2011 at 12:34 pm
The thing these numbers can do, if nothing else, is awaken the editors of these journals to the fact that they’re so strongly skewed toward male writers. Ideally, an editor would see these numbers and think “what can I do to change this” rather than looking for reasons/excuses, even legitimate ones, for why the situation is the way it is. Unfortunately, I think we’re more likely to see the latter than the former.
February 2nd, 2011 at 12:35 pm
I don’t need all the numbers, but some numbers would be helpful.
February 2nd, 2011 at 12:40 pm
T,
I’ve seen that happen as well–last year when I solicited poems for our National Poetry Month poem a day series, I wound up asking about 10-15% more women than men, but I did that to get the equity I was looking for. (I was looking for more than gender equity, by the way–I wrote a piece about it explaining how I went about that project.) So should I just have thrown my hands up in the air when more women than men turned me down? I don’t think so. I asked more women, because that was important to me as an editor.
And I just want to reiterate one point from my last comment. If you look at these numbers as a means to cast blame on a particular person or group, then you’ll be able to find all sorts of other reasons why this disparity is different from other disparities, or why this should be a special case. A better way to approach this is not to cast blame, but rather to acknowledge the disparity and see what can be done to rectify it going forward. Positive strategies rather than blame casting, in short.
February 2nd, 2011 at 12:50 pm
A few days ago I read that Wikipedia’s editors are only 15% female — and that’s entirely voluntary, no gatekeeper. Sure, someone might undo your work, but if you write/edit for Wikipedia, you are a statistical entity by their measure.
I think the real value in this kind of information is for the reader. No reader of Harpers or the New Yorker or of any major book review should read under the delusion that they are reading the best work of the most merit chosen by the fairest methods.
We should always be suspicious when a publication claims to have no biases (to be “fair and balanced”) — honest outlets admit their biases, whether that’s a preference for alcoholic womanizing protagonists or for sassy self-possessed sex workers.
We should accept that the bias (for whatever reason, by whatever process) of most mainstream and literary outlets is male. And if we want that to change, we’ll have to work very hard to change it.
February 2nd, 2011 at 12:54 pm
I agree with Jessica. Especially as relying on anecdotal evidence is dangerous.
I don’t see Vida’s numbers as putting the blame anywhere. A lot of sexism or bias like this is institutional. It’s not that editors are consciously choosing men over women, it’s that they are doing what’s always been done without thinking much about it. I like what Brian says, that these numbers are hopefully what inspire editors to take a hard look at their tables of contents and publishing decisions.
I think these numbers are a great start to the conversation. They provide a broad frame of reference for everyone, which I think is important once we also begin to look at more numbers and the many factors that influence those numbers. (I certainly don’t think boycotting Tin House or anyone else is a solution. Being critical of one aspect of a magazine doesn’t mean it’s not also a fantastic magazine in other aspects.)
February 2nd, 2011 at 12:56 pm
Stephen: I agree you should be able to get some numbers on books easily. In fact, I think The Rumpus could provide us with this fairly easily. I just did a quick scan through Little, Brown’s spring 2011 catalog for fiction (since they have it online as a tumblr) and got:
17.5-10.5
The only note I’d make on that is that like half their catalog is James Patterson co-written thrillers (the .5 represents one he co-wrote with a woman) so if you wanted just “literary fiction” the numbers would be different.
Brian:
I personally tend to solicit more women than men for the same reasons. (Although I can imagine that many people might find this practice improper too) I do think gender equality is an important goal to strive for. However, I do think the issue gets complex especially when you zoom the lens back a bit. We can say, shouldn’t men and women be published equally? and we will probably agree. And we would probably also agree that many races and ethnicities are under represented and how straight authors are more prominent than gay authors. Many people argue about the lack of translations and foreign writers in US magazines. My point is not that we should toss our hands in the air and say things should be better, but only that being an editor requires a lot of different considerations.
And I do think, unfortunately, that the constant focus on what a magazine publishes leads a lot of people to assume the sexism comes from editors when in reality it is much deeper and even female editors soliciting more female writers than men often end up with male heavy issues.
February 2nd, 2011 at 1:06 pm
I agree with Margosita. No one is casting blame, and a boycott of any publication is just plain silly. No one has proposed that as far as I know. VIDA has simply given us a broad frame of reference to begin establishing an argument. More numbers would help, sure, but more important: Many women writers don’t even want to talk about this topic because they think it’s dangerous. No one wants to complain. No one wants to be accused of sour grapes. VIDA’s pie charts provide some proof, at last, and if the result is that more editors think “What can I do to change this?” — as Brian says — that would be great.
February 2nd, 2011 at 1:09 pm
*I should clarify, though it doesn’t really make much of a difference this far into the discussion — I didn’t mean ALL numbers from everywhere, ever, every genre — just the publications featured in the graphs.
But anyway.
Maybe it’s hopelessly naive/arrogant of me, and as loathe as I am to say the following phrase, but “speaking as a woman,” who writes, publishes an online magazine, reviews books, and isn’t straight, I suppose my small method of counteracting the overall disparity in coverage is to just keep on doing what I’m doing and tell people about it. Small waves, butterfly in the Amazon, etc., etc.
Get busy, make stuff, speak up, in essence.
Of course, there are no easy answers, but we can at least be more aware of our own efforts.
February 2nd, 2011 at 1:59 pm
Good questions and yes you need numbers, contexts, fact-checkers, etc. Am guessing you’ll find not as many women submitting as men, as well as some degree of sexism, what else is new. Or maybe we’ll all be surprised, though my gut feeling is not so much.
Speaking of political writing–as some have been, lately, I highly recommend this organization as a resource for women interested in entering the op-ed fray: http://www.theopedproject.org/
Stats at the top of the page reflect # of woman-authored pieces *published.* Recall seeing a stat indicating that women-authored pieces make up only about 12% of op-ed submissions–but don’t quote me on that. Katie Orenstein probably knows, though. Katie co-founded the Op-Ed Project, which is very active in providing women with the knowledge, tools and information they need to write strong Op-Eds, *submit them* and get them published.
Good for the Rumpus for staying on top of this story.
February 2nd, 2011 at 2:49 pm
A submissions count wouldn’t and shouldn’t make a difference on this issue. Why? Consider quality as an analogy: if a publication wasn’t receiving enough high-quality submissions, would the editors decide to start publishing crappy work, and then say, well, we just weren’t receiving good stuff? No, they would go out and find the good stuff, because the quality of the work they choose to publish defines their publication, and not the other way around. Editors are not and cannot be at the mercy of what is thrown at them. They are responsible for what they publish. This takes planning, networking, good management and awareness of what you desire to represent at a publication.
VIDA’s count provides a great picture of the author-gender priorities of editors, and that helps to illuminate all the other tentacles of the equity problem.
February 2nd, 2011 at 2:56 pm
I think the graphs are great exactly as they are: A blunt reminder that much of the publishing world is nowhere near parity, for reasons that are both blatantly systemic and too insidious to be counter-balanced by other numbers. The “maybe women just don’t write enough or submit enough” response is a superficial dismissal of a much deeper problem, and uses circular logic to protect the status quo.
Even if the submission numbers bear it out: Why do you think that is? And why has it not been important enough to these publications to address the issue in a consequential way? Why is the will not there to seek and cultivate the women who may indeed be waiting for someone to give them permission, because of the culture they were raised in, the encoded crap they internalized, the parents or schooling they had–who knows! Or start with the ones already hustling, but standing outside the club doors–their example will be an even more potent agent of change.
Here’s the example I tend to use: Harper’s magazine has 36 contributing editors and THREE of them are women. That sends a message to every aspiring female writer–maybe one who grew up reading the magazine–that this is a closed shop, so don’t come knocking. Those messages proliferate throughout the culture, and they are a symptom of something toxic and inert that we should be confronted with as often as possible, because even awareness of a problem contributes–in ways that defy measurement–to resolving it.
February 2nd, 2011 at 2:59 pm
Two weeks ago I started a small fiction press; at least half the titles I publish will be woman-authored, a promise I articulated right away. In the first 48 hours after I announced the press, I had a pile of queries; 20% were from women. By the end of the first week, 30% were from women. Now, after two weeks, nearly 42% have been from women.
This doesn’t mean anything in particular–the people who know about my press are people to whom I’m connected in some way, probably online, or people they know, etc. Perhaps those connections skew male. But it’s been pretty fascinating to me to explicitly ask for work by women, and still have more come in from men.
The stuff I’ve already received, from both men and women, is good enough to fill my small slate for a year or two. I feel like I have to say this publicly, since one of the comments/replies I keep fielding accuses me of planning to publish inferior work so that I can publish women. This accusation, of course, is sexist all by itself. But it’s also a common part of our cultural response to this discussion, the goal of which is often to shut conversation down entirely.
February 2nd, 2011 at 3:45 pm
More data is always… more data. It doesn’t change the reality of these publications putting fewer women in print than men. Knowing the numbers starts the conversation, it isn’t the entirety of it. I’m heartened by Brian and T’s observations above that the commitment to parity is more important than casting blame on why it hasn’t been achieved;(unfortunately) there won’t be Reparations for the decades of male domination of publishing, I’m not going to start getting a pension check for every piece by a woman that wasn’t published, there will be no mea culpas issued from The New Yorker (although a girl can dream). However, publications taking notice of their actions, in real time, can create parity. That’s what these numbers do, create a metric by which publications can see how they are doing, and in a good capitalist market system, compare themselves to competitors. Hopefully, readers will reward the ones who get it right.
And the “quality over quotas” argument is a dead end. It assumes that “quality” fiction is a fixed, objective measure and not determined by prevailing cultural values. The many reasons women aren’t published in the same numbers as men, don’t submit at the same rate as men, etc. are as much about gender inequality in society as they are about the microcosm of the editorial room.
Anyway, it’s all love. Glad to see VIDA getting a platform on The Rumpus.
February 2nd, 2011 at 3:48 pm
Apologies for pure laziness (I’ve been online getting the word out all day), but I’m going to steal a comment and re-post it (most esp bc Carolyn says it more eloquently than I did), though I think it echoes much of what Brian S has already said –
Also, the Wikipedia questions should also include why aren’t women working harder there? Is it about the value of the work? How they are treated? Etc.
Carolyn Zaikowski’s logical response posted at The Count (http://vidaweb.org/the-count-2010):
I’m not an expert, but having studied statistics, it seems these numbers were compiled using the best possible methods and available information and should be taken in good faith for what they are worth. Statistics are not perfect and even the most careful statistics can only point to realities, not completely encompass them. So to everyone who is raising issues about the statistical methods, that’s fine, but in the process, please don’t lose sight of the reality beneath the surface of these graphs, a reality that anybody seriously involved in the writing world would have to go to great lengths to ignore or defend: Women are not encouraged to create, write, submit, or publish in a serious way. Men are encouraged to create, write, submit, and publish in a very serious way. This dynamic occurs both very subtly and very blatantly and it permeates all mainstream education, collective and individual psyches, the economy, politics, and culture. Based on these numbers, as well as common sense, it should not be surprising that men are submitting, publishing, and supporting each other, and that even the best women writers are being blown off. And it should be recognized that, generally, in the wonderful places where this is not happening, it is because people have engaged in consciousness raising and taken action.
February 2nd, 2011 at 3:50 pm
I have my own response to this over at my blog, but it doesn’t differ enough from Stephen’s essential point to warrant summary here. I do, however, feel obliged to respond to the most recent comments.
To assert that editors should somehow be responsible for seeking out work beyond what is submitted to them is both unfair to editors and missing the point. If I submit to Tin House, but my friend does not, and my friend is actually solicited simply because she’s a woman (and that does seem to be what Julie’s analogy is prescribing), then she has been awarded for a lack of submission (whatever may have motivated it), and I (along with the other male writers submitting) have been punished for my sex. It’s not just impractical for an already harried editor, it’s also, ironically, quite sexist.
Those who suggest, as both Stephen and I do, that we need the submission numbers to form a useful analysis are not implying that those numbers would negate the issue. But they would certainly alter its nature, and lift a good deal of the burden from editors’ shoulders, where it seems to have been wholly placed at the moment. I don’t believe there isn’t a problem, but I do believe that these numbers fail to tell us exactly what that problem is, or how we should go about dealing with it.
February 2nd, 2011 at 4:04 pm
Chris, with all due respect, I think the issue arose in the first place because women were, as you say “punished for their sex.” To seek equity, as an editor, is to attempt to resolve that long-standing prejudice against women, and to reverse the absence of women’s voices in mainstream culture. It’s not just about soliciting writing from women, it’s about bringing women on board in a variety of ways–as editors, designers, researchers, fact-checkers, managers, etc–and establishing your publication as a place that welcomes, encourages and authentically values writing by an inclusive variety of voices. And paying them equally.
So yes, VIDA’s count can’t cover all these bases, but it does reflect the status quo. And I strongly feel that it is also, absolutely, the responsibility of women to write more, submit more, become editors and publishers themselves and create more opportunities, rather than just waiting around for the invitation. I think VIDA’s count helps push the door open.
February 2nd, 2011 at 4:06 pm
Chris,
You really don’t think editors should actively seek submissions when part of their reading population is underrepresented? Editors should simply be passive then? I realize this is a simplification, but so is the notion that editors don’t have any responsibility to their audiences beyond waiting to see what rolls in. Your argument would exclude all solicitations, and the varying reasons for them, then.
February 2nd, 2011 at 4:10 pm
To suggest also that women need special handing-holding in order to get them to submit is also insulting to the women who actually do submit work.
February 2nd, 2011 at 4:19 pm
Yes, Julie, I’d certainly agree with all that. I don’t disbelieve VIDA’s results or underestimate their contribution; I’m very glad, in fact, that they’ve given the issue more definition. I only mean to say that they can’t in and of themselves form the basis for explanation and action. And yes, of course it’s impossible to cry sexism as a man without first conceding that women were its earliest victims, but I firmly believe that to answer that crime with a crime of an identical nature is both inefficient and hypocritical.
What you suggest, finding ways for women to achieve greater numbers in staff positions, is a very valid point. It absolutely goes without saying that more women should be represented in these numbers, whatever the reason for their absence or the strategy for rectifying it. But being a man myself, I’d prefer to see it done with less finger-pointing. After all, my own very first contribution to the Rumpus this past week was a review of a female author.
February 2nd, 2011 at 4:23 pm
To characterize the act of soliciting good writers as “hand holding” is insulting.
I solicit good writers for a number of reasons & on a variety of bases, and yes, sometimes because the submissions rec’d are mostly white hetero males. Does the act of soliciting somehow invalidate the work that was submitted and accepted? Only if you think the very act of soliciting work is somehow debased in general.
And by the way, most publications solicit. To find out their criteria, you’d have to ask them.
February 2nd, 2011 at 4:26 pm
Um, where’s the finger pointing?
February 2nd, 2011 at 4:34 pm
I should clarify the bit about solicitation. I don’t mean to say editors cannot or should not solicit, only that I don’t believe they should be held responsible for it, especially for this particular reason. There is a vast difference between soliciting an author because she is a valued contributor and soliciting her simply because she’s a woman and there are too many men already. At that point, sex, not ability or aesthetic, becomes the issue, and those submitters who are not the least bit involved in the problem suffer. This serves only to ape the seminal problem. So yes, I think it does invalidate the work of others who submitted (though not, obviously, that of those accepted).
February 2nd, 2011 at 4:37 pm
I will say that I think it is a better solution for women to realize that if they submit they will get published (and for editors and writers to promote this knowledge). An even better solution is to get society to tell women to speak their minds and put themselves out there as much as men do. Many women do this, of course, but many are taught to be more passive and deferential and internalize this. Editors treating women writers differently to help restore balance is not a bad thing, but it doesn’t help treat the root causes I dont’ think.
As for Wikipedia, Amy, most editors (ie anyone who wants to add to an article) aren’t treated like anything. I edit on wikipedia now and then and don’t have any kind of interaction with anyone else. Especially on the subject of more obscure topics that need expansion, which is what the NYT article focused on, you are pretty much working on your own.
February 2nd, 2011 at 4:39 pm
“Good writers” being the operative phrase there. Of course we want good writers, of any gender.
I don’t have a problem soliciting work except when it’s just because “oh, we have too many white guys, and I don’t want the appearance of being a publication that caters to only white guys.”
That’s not what I’m saying you’re doing, but I suppose I just get cranky when we get all “should” and “supposed to” about numbers, not the work itself.
I’d rather solicit someone’s work because I’m a fan of their work, not just because their gender/sexuality/race/etc. has a low number in that issue.
February 2nd, 2011 at 4:40 pm
Re this from Julie:
“No, they would go out and find the good stuff, because the quality of the work they choose to publish defines their publication, and not the other way around. Editors are not and cannot be at the mercy of what is thrown at them. They are responsible for what they publish. This takes planning, networking, good management and awareness of what you desire to represent at a publication.”
Agreed that this is what editors *should* do.
A practical question arises, though:
Most editors I’ve known haven’t had a whole lot of time or money on their hands. Doesn’t going out and finding good writers require at least one of the two?
Or, yes, it requires connections. But when connections are in play–or at least in heavy play–am guessing that editors will often wind up selecting writers who are friends-of-friends or acquaintances of acquaintances of friendishes of friends. Which could be limiting.
Big point: A lot of women who raise families don’t have much time, energy or head-space to devote to writing. Not only do they shoulder most childcare, they often shoulder eldercare as well–and friend-care, in some cases! Everyone knows this, yet it’s something people seem to forget or gloss over in discussions such as these.
There’s a class angle too, of course, as always. Women who are wealthy and can afford nannies, housekeepers, etc. are more likely to write and submit stuff, I’m guessing, as they have more time.
*Should* women (starting when they are girls) be encouraged to write like motherfuckers. Absolutely! No argument there. Are there complex reasons they wind up writing and submitting less than men? Yes. Are we living in a sexist society? Again, absolutely. It’s not just a writer issue, as we all know–look at CEOs of businesses and it’s the same story, though it’s starting to change.
Anyway, a book could be written about this subject but I’ll stop here.
February 2nd, 2011 at 4:52 pm
Chris, aesthetics must always be the issue. But you have to make sure that the range of opportunity for aesthetic choices is rich and well-represented by all sexes. Editors are the filter through which everything published is processed. Like it or not, they are responsible for what they print in their publication. And to fill out a high-quality publication they routinely solicit work from writers. Who are the writers they’re asking, and what biases–conscious or subconscious–may be informing their requests? I don’t think that’s insulting to anyone. It’s simply asking them to widen their radar.
February 2nd, 2011 at 4:52 pm
T, ***this is a big issue, so important and, as big issues tend to be, hella messy and complex and full of those fancy nuancey things. As often, education is the answer, and for this money is needed, because many of the voices I’d like to hear from do *not* come from stable or healthy homes and are the ones who need extra support, tutoring, cheering on (which, again, costs).
***”I will say that I think it is a better solution for women to realize that if they submit they will get published (and for editors and writers to promote this knowledge). An even better solution is to get society to tell women to speak their minds and put themselves out there as much as men do. Many women do this, of course, but many are taught to be more passive and deferential and internalize this. Editors treating women writers differently to help restore balance is not a bad thing, but it doesn’t help treat the root causes I dont’ think.”
Really encouraging people to speak their minds is a great idea–one that gets a lot of lip-service. Does anyone really like it when someone speaks their mind? Sure, if they agree with the person. Or if they don’t feel threatened by what the other has to say. Most of the time, though, people don’t want to hear what’s on your mind–they want to hear what’s on theirs.
February 2nd, 2011 at 5:04 pm
Really encouraging people to speak their minds is a great idea–one that gets a lot of lip-service. Does anyone really like it when someone speaks their mind? Sure, if they agree with the person. Or if they don’t feel threatened by what the other has to say. Most of the time, though, people don’t want to hear what’s on your mind–they want to hear what’s on theirs.
Ha.
Again, word.
February 2nd, 2011 at 5:05 pm
Melissa: Definitely an extremely complex issue and I’m not even going to pretend to have any great answers.
However, I do wonder if the focus is a little too negative in these discussions. From my perspective and experience, the lack of submissions and lack of solicitation “yes”es are a bigger cause of publication discrepancy than simply sexist editors, although that is a problem too obviously. It may be more positive to let women writers know about the submission discrepancy and encourage them to fix it than it is to simply look at publications and have women feel like submitting is hopeless and editors are sexists.
February 2nd, 2011 at 5:06 pm
Maybe “negative” isn’t the right word, because women should certainly feel negative about sexism in society.
February 2nd, 2011 at 5:13 pm
Correcting gender disparity (and the many other forms of systenic bias which are less obvious [and fortunately less severe]) is a huge and complex issue. Fortunately, the specific role of a literary editor is pretty simple: to solicit work from females who consistently produce quality. We don’t need to network to do this; we need only READ; almost every female author I’ve solicited was thrilled to get a solicitation from a stranger. Reading and soliciting are the most important part of an edior’s work; we are, indeed, harried and tired, but all of our other business comes after this process. Blame is not the issue; I doubt there’s a peson in this thread who can’t determine their own role in addressing this situation – that won’t banish world genderisms, but it’ll sure as shit change VIDA’s statistics.
Wikipedia is a different issue. Wikipedia, after 10 years of development, has become no less genderist but far more insular. The culture is hostile to change, structure, and most especially experts who use their real names (and in 21st Century poetry, almost every expert can be accused of having a “conflict of interest.” If you head over there and use the search string “User talk:Jimbo Wales” you’ll see the rapmant mysogyny on the founder’s “talk page,” and his vague, paralyzed hand-wringing in response — if he took action, all his volunteers would quit. We’re out of our depth trying to effect change there — Wikipedia must be fundementally replaced with another system.
February 2nd, 2011 at 7:40 pm
VIDAweb.org Statistics, 2010-2011
Total Feature Articles (including counting articles): 20
Total Feature Articles by Women: 19
Total Feature Articles by Men: 1
Percentage of Feature Articles by Women: 95%
Percentage of Feature Articles by Men: 5%
Is the problem that men aren’t submitting as often as women, or that VIDA editors aren’t doing their part to actively solicit work from men? Perhaps male issues are deemed less interesting to VIDA’s perceived audience? Or perhaps the audience has been shaped by societally prevalent ideas about who should be reading VIDA? Does this mean society should change? Does it mean that VIDA editors are concurrently culpable for the change they haven’t helped initiated in the readership and writership of websites about the interests of women?
All this needs investigating. The numbers don’t lie.
February 2nd, 2011 at 9:58 pm
I would like to compliment Concerned Woman for her cogent analysis of VIDA’s publishing habits and powerful exposé of this gross injustice. I have changed my mind about the work VIDA is doing now, and will do everything within my power to ensure that places whose stated goal is to “explore critical and cultural perceptions of writing by women through meaningful conversation and the exchange of ideas among existing and emerging literary communities” will only do so with equal input from men.
Or rather, I’ll do that when there’s equity everywhere.
I hereby award you the Titanium medal in False Equivalence. That’s right. I made up a medal just for you. Good work.
February 2nd, 2011 at 10:11 pm
JP:
I think that would be true if we were talking about the percentage of short stories published in lit mags, but almost all the chart in that VIDA link are about the gender of books reviewed and book reviewers. That brings up a whole host of other questions and issues (such as what books are being published by publishers and what books are popular amongst readers, etc.)
February 2nd, 2011 at 10:15 pm
(I’m loving this conversation, and wondering, as a Rumpus thing, if there is any way to move Blog-section items that have active comments to the center aisle of the main Rumpus page. The blog moves fast, and several times I’ve forgotten about really great ongoing conversations because they’ve been bumped down or off the front page so quickly.)
February 2nd, 2011 at 11:00 pm
Yep, I’m the guy that by the time he read the full thread, forgot the scope of the original article. Can I have a snarky award for poor logic? Wait, let me change my internet-name to pretend to be female.
Still, without attempting to trivialize the complexity of the issue, I think my point is valid in regard to much of the “what to do?” Discussion. Don’t we know? We tidy our own backyards. Good practices spread more quickly than ideas related in Internet debate.
February 3rd, 2011 at 6:34 am
I have no idea who he is but I love Brian Spears. “Ideally, an editor would see these numbers and think “what can I do to change this” rather than looking for reasons/excuses, even legitimate ones, for why the situation is the way it is. Unfortunately, I think we’re more likely to see the latter than the former.”
Thanks for stepping up man.
February 3rd, 2011 at 7:27 am
I’m late to this (great) conversation but have read all of these, and nowhere do I see any musings about what it means for writers to make room in their lives to write, let alone do the heavy lifting of submitting. Any writer who becomes a parent, like it or not, has a different relationship to their work than a non-parent. This is overwhelmingly true of women who become parents. Having raised a family as a writer, to me the graph simply looks like an accurate reflection of domestic realities. Writing requires a perfect storm of slogging effort, inspiration, tenacity and ego. Grown men’s lives are much more hospitable to the incredible singlemindedness of it all, even if they have families. As a woman, I’ll add (excuse the mild snark) that I don’t think the world needs many more books about how difficult this disparity is, or books that are Women’s Voices with a capital WV. Women, like men, just want good writing, regardless of the messenger. I agree with Sara H’s comments. Expecting all editors to actively solicit more work from women feels a little too much like bowling with gutter guards. Woo, macho analogy.
Lastly, I’ll add that I’m in my 50′s. I hope younger people in this thread don’t think I’m reducing social/gender issues to a weary or callous-sounding “that’s just the way it is”. Believe me, I understand the frustrations of the endeavor, at any age, for women. Thanks, Rumpus…
February 3rd, 2011 at 9:38 am
Why are we not mentioning that art is a subjective medium and that no matter gender there is always going to be an imbalance of who is published and what is published based on an magazine editor or publishers personal preference. The numbers seem to validate this point. I write non-fiction that is heavily based on my Ultra Orthodox Jewish upbringing and I’m having a difficult time finding that lit mag or that editor that has really fallen in love with my work. Is it because the writing sucks? That I’m a male? That the genre is non-fiction? Or that the writing is heavily influenced by my Jewish background? Maybe but ultimately as a reader and writer I can’t get angry about because it’s a subjective decision based on the work and how that editor will find threads of his story is another work. I think people are getting confused between product and who’s making the product. If the product is good or relates to the buyer it will be successful no matter the gender. Some of my favorite authors are women. Am I not understanding another point to this argument? I’m open to clarification, thanks.
February 3rd, 2011 at 9:58 am
Actually, Moshe, we have mentioned the subjectivity of art in this discussion. We’ve mentioned that it’s that very subjectivity which blows holes in the “it’s the work that matters, not the gender of the author” argument, as though there’s some objective standard of good writing that we can all agree on, and so if more men are being published than women, then it’s just that they’re not writing strong enough work. That’s an intellectually lazy argument. Frankly, if you’re editing a journal that doesn’t cater to a specific group or mindset or artistic ethos and you wind up with, for instance, an all white-male table of contents, that says a lot more about you and your values as a reader and editor than it says about the quality of the journal.
February 3rd, 2011 at 10:13 am
I also love Brian Spears, and this conversation. And surprisingly, I think I also love “Concerned Woman” for unintentionally raising a really interesting point: How do publications that are explicitly committed to publishing women do it? Especially if all these women writers are supposedly typing with one hand and wiping their baby’s ass with the other? Or if their editors are working for free?
February 3rd, 2011 at 10:27 am
I also love Brian and Julie, for the record.
February 3rd, 2011 at 10:30 am
I am in an MFA program which has more women than men, and I see us all submitting pretty equally. I think that theory that women are just not submitting is pretty simplistic, Stephen. Sexism, like racism, is often way more psychologically complex than “we aren’t going to publish this because it is written by a female”. There can be subconscious biases at play. Like someone said near the top, they didn’t like to read female authors because female authors write about certain things or write in a certain way. Even if this was true (which I am not sure it is), why have we decided as a society that “female” topics are stupid and boring, and “male” topics are not? In addition, we could ask, are publishers creating this dichotomy of “female” novels vs. “male” novels? If I look at my MFA program as a microcosm, I am inclined to think so. We have one woman writing about the extreme fighting (as a sport) world, and another writing about drug wars in Colombia, another writing about homelessness at rest stops. Is it possible that the publishers subconsciously expect us to all be Nora Ephron and have hidden gender bias? These are the questions we should examine, not just “are women submitting less than men”. Stephen, I found your comment in the Rumpus e-mail that “It does seem that women aren’t submitting their work as often as men” somewhat troubling. On the one hand, it’s nice that you want to believe we live in a world where that must be the problem. But it also sounds a bit defensive, and hints at a lack of wanting to see the problem as more complex and part of a deeper institutional sexism.
February 3rd, 2011 at 10:40 am
p.s. I at least appreciate the discussion this has prompted, and am impressed with Brian Spears’ take. When I was looking at these numbers yesterday, I happened to be sitting in a coffee shop with the fiction editor of a well known literary magazine, who was pretty dismissive of it as legitimate.
February 3rd, 2011 at 10:54 am
I think that these numbers are somewhat in a void until we actually know how many manuscripts are actually submitted and the gender breakdown of those submissions. Publishers are the ultimate gatekeepers here. If you have 100 manuscripts submitted in a given week, and just based on the population, let’s say that they are equally divided between men and women, and then 75% of those submissions that are accepted are written by men, and only 25% of those submissions accepted are written by women, then it skews the entire process from the get go. Are publishers willing to look at their biases and their submission policies? Are they willing to go on record and say, well, the submissions by women aren’t as good as their male counterparts? Certainly if the slush pile is dominated by male authors, then that’s one thing. If the the slush pile is gender neutral and yet more men are accepted for publication versus women, then I think there is a profound problem. Because it’s starting at the VERY begining of this process, and there’s no way you can up the percentages of women getting published or even reviewed if their manuscripts are summarily being rejected because of gender bias.
I think there are a lot of really probing questions that need to be asked.
February 3rd, 2011 at 11:45 am
Julie raises the question: Which publications *are* “explicitly committed to publishing women?”
Anyone know?
February 3rd, 2011 at 11:55 am
By the way, what I’ve said about women doing mothering, sistering, daughtering, friendering etc. was not mean to be insulting. Raising children and loving people is the most important work there is. Pragmatism always peeks its head in–and more often than not that pragmatism enters in the form of cold hard coin and the time it buys.
February 3rd, 2011 at 11:58 am
So yeah, if your nanny is wiping the bottoms of your children you will have more time to write, at least in theory. If this is flawed reasoning maybe someone could present an argument as to why? Because I’m not understanding that part.
February 3rd, 2011 at 1:01 pm
Melissa, I didn’t see the earlier points you made about this and they’re great. I don’t think your reasoning is flawed at all, or an oversimplification of the problem, or a convenient excuse for sexism among editors. I think it’s a real factor in the picture the numbers paint, and can’t easily be budged.
February 3rd, 2011 at 1:29 pm
“And so if more men are being published than women, then it’s just that they’re not writing strong enough work. That’s an intellectually lazy argument.” Brian, I completely agree. My point is not “strong enough work,” but rather, you can have a strong piece but if it doesn’t relate to someone as a reader (editor), I believe his/her chances of being published will diminish dramatically. I’m basing my argument purely on: you tell me your story and I somehow get mine. Now, if there is proof that a piece does meet that requirement, per say, and it’s rejected purely based on gender, now we have more of a point. How does one prove that? Numbers are great but does not reflect or prove that a certain amount of pieces that were emotionally/psychologically/literary pleasing to an editor and were rejected
based upon gender.
E.g. If I were a publisher I wouldn’t have published Eat Pray Love but I definitely would have published Kathryn Harrison (The Kiss), Sarah Manguso (Two Kinds of Decay), Maggie Nelson (Bluets), Amy Fusselman, Patricia Hampl etc. Am I being sexist for not getting “my story” out of Giblert’s book but through the other authors mentioned?
February 3rd, 2011 at 2:36 pm
When I was an arts editor at a weekly newspaper during part of the last decade, I found that in order to work toward a gender balance of freelance reviewers, we had to seek out women more actively than men. In other words, more men were pitching, and the pool of known freelancers skewed male (though that was changing). We probably only achieved gender balance in a few issues (and I know we did worse in terms of racial and ethnic diversity), but being mindful of the issue, I think, helped make the paper rangier and more interesting. Likewise with a journal publishing fiction and poetry, the best argument for gender equality–assuming the journal’s mission doesn’t preclude such a thing, because for instance it’s Vida–is that the journal’s reflection of, or opposition to, the world will be richer as a result. Especially since fiction and poetry have (as no doubt we’ve all noticed) a longstanding interest in romantic life, it seems obvious that the reader is served by diversity: women writing about men recently dumped by men, young men writing about old men, women writing about girls, and on and on. This last is just an example; the increased-richness argument holds for journals publishing, say, experimental work that may deal less directly with sex and love. Like others above, I’m not sure that the gender mix of Tin House submitters is terribly relevant; they’re a big-time journal (you know, in relative terms) and could probably successfully court most writers on their wish list. Nothing suggests that they’re pulling heavily from their slush pile, though I know they always mix in young and obscure writers with established names. They did do that female fabulists issue a few years back, though of course the theme issue isn’t the answer.
Although we seem to be speaking chiefly of literary journals and their decisions as regards fiction and poetry, the pie-charts assembled by Vida are as much or more concerned with book reviews: the gender breakdown of reviewers and the authors discussed in said reviews. As others have noted, one would need to have stats on the gender mix of books being published in genres covered by the respective journals in order to know if, or to what extent, female writers are being neglected. But one suspects that the average percentage of male writers reviewed isn’t proportionate to the percentage of those published. Obviously this leads quickly to questions about sexism in the criticism itself. Many have recently pointed out how Jonathan Franzen (whose work I like quite a lot, if that matters, which it doesn’t) is loudly and often pompously praised for his politically colored but essentially family-driven novels, whereas women covering similar terrain and at similar levels of artistry are celebrated less fervently, or sometimes dismissed or faintly praised as practitioners of an elegant but minor subgenre. (I realize that *no one* in literary fiction is celebrated as loudly as Franzen and that the example accordingly runs into some problems.) Rivka Galchen deals in passing with being marginalized as a “domestic” writer in her recent Bookforum essay on Lydia Davis’s translation of “Madame Bovary.” By the way, that Bookforum issue, by my hasty calculation, employed 24 men and 10 women to write reviews or essays covering books by 24 men and 9 women. (A few of the essays didn’t address a single book; I put a hash mark in both columns when confronted with Flaubert and Davis, which seemed fair since the essay is more about the translator than the translated).
February 3rd, 2011 at 7:06 pm
Dylan, thanks for point regarding the reader’s experience. Ultimately, an editor’s job is not to be fair to authors, who wouldn’t know from fair anyway. It’s to enrich readers, and that requires a diverse — even anti-proportional — authorship.
February 4th, 2011 at 11:44 am
Would like to open this up again, if possible, by quoting a beloved writer, someone whose work has resonated with me since I was a pre-teen. And her birthday is coming up, too, so there’s that.
“Tongue-suicide is not only the choice of children. It is common among the infantile heads of state and power merchants whose evacuated language leaves them with no access to what is left of their human instincts for they speak only to those who obey, or in order to force obedience. The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties for menace and subjugation. Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge. Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux-language of mindless media; whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy or the commodity driven language of science; whether it is the malign language of law-without-ethics, or language designed for the estrangement of minorities, hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek — it must be rejected, altered and exposed. It is the language that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind. Sexist language, racist language, theistic language — all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas.” — Toni Morrison
February 4th, 2011 at 1:42 pm
p.s. Sallysandy, thank you for your response!
February 5th, 2011 at 1:00 pm
Seems Toni Morrison is more of a closer then? So it goes.
Yes to this from Sallysandy, by the way: “Women, like men, just want good writing, regardless of the messenger.”
February 5th, 2011 at 1:12 pm
Melissa, didn’t mean to leave you hanging! Let me go on the record to say that I departed this conversation to read a fantastic unsolicited submission to the Rumpus by a woman, referred by a woman, and to put the closing edits on a piece of my own that I’m now ready to send around for consideration. That, quite honestly, seems the only answer to this entire quandary: get writing, get sending, keep reading, and publish more women. Ultimately, it’s a conversation that’s inspiring and motivating. Commenters above suggest that this problem is too complex, but really, it’s incredibly simple.
February 5th, 2011 at 3:13 pm
This is a problem, and a complicated one. If submissions are indeed much lower from women, then it may be related to some of the issues that Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever explore in their book “Women Don’t Ask”. They find that women are reluctant to ask for raises and promotions, reluctant to negotiate for themselves, and when they do ask they face social repercussions for coming across as too demanding/unlikeable/unwomanly. The why of all of this is tricky to untangle, but it appears to be real, and appears to be learned rather than innate behavior.
It seems that unsolicited submissions and pitches involve quite a bit of self-promotion. Declining solicitations is another issue, and I’d be interested in seeing data on that too for a more complete picture of the landscape.
Sexism is obviously not just the fault of editors of literary magazines, but that doesn’t mean that editors of these magazines can’t work to improve the situation in their own publications. Recognizing it is a real and not imagined problem seems like a good step. Encouraging women to submit and taking a longer look at the things that women do submit seem like more good steps.
February 5th, 2011 at 5:12 pm
I wonder if part of the problem comes from how we define “literary”.
Most of the books that have come to define it have come from lone dudes toiling apart from the world. Are the themes that (some) women tend toward just not literary enough?
This made me think of Elissa Bassist’s letter to Sugar that inspired Write Like a Motherfucker. She wrote: “I fear that even if I do manage to write, that the stories I write—about my vagina, etc.—will be disregarded and mocked.”
Maybe if it’s not literary to write something that cares about the major preoccupations of half the species than the problem is with “literary,” not women. Maybe we should consider more closely what we mean by the term?
February 5th, 2011 at 9:33 pm
I love the Toni Morrison quote. Really glad you shared it. But those are fighting words. Those words remind me that there are ways that I resist knowing that I am belittling someone with ways I think about them, ways I question their description of the world, that I resist knowing certain truth about my advantages. It raises the question of privilege and whether it can be put down for the sake of someone else having more of their “fair share.” I am so glad the Rumpus has these conversations. I find them difficult in person — or I used to. It can cost a lot to confront someone with their (even unwitting, and maybe especially unwitting) use of violent language, of committing violence by failing to see that someone else is having a different, less fair, more narrowed, more difficult life experience because of a category like gender, race, class, sexual orientation, ethnicity, and especially because of how that category is both lived and *seen* (or not seen) in a particular society.
I always think sexism persists in part because of sex and more specifically, procreation. To conform to the current ideals of your gender means you are more attractive and more likely to get some – not that you can’t find a special someone otherwise, but you have more choices if you are a hetero woman who conforms. So, more likely to mate and have kids and have a family. (I am so going to get blasted for this.) So it is self-perpetuating. In academia, there’s the term “trailing spouse.” It’s the person who comes along with the desired hire. In academia, sometimes it’s a man — have no idea of the numbers. But in terms of the wider world, in how many marriages is the woman the more powerful, the more successful, the more talented?
Women writers have been talking about this forever. Needing a room of one’s own, needing space, time, energy, let alone support. And the push against it starts when you are born. “What a pretty little girl!” “What a smart boy!” And then a million variations, over and over, every day, for the rest of your life.
February 6th, 2011 at 1:36 pm
Thanks for picking up, Julie. Inspirational exchanges are a good thing, as are, I would add, uncomfortable ones. Would hope we wouldn’t have to sacrifice one for the other. That would be a shame. And actually I do think it’s a complex problem–though some of the causes might be simple, and though some potential solutions might be simple enough (for some people) to enact.
February 6th, 2011 at 7:39 pm
Mary, thanks for mentioning the book, will look it up. Agree that girls and women are often punished (in overt and subtle ways) for asking, even if what they are asking for is information.
And re this:
“They find that women are reluctant to ask for raises and promotions, reluctant to negotiate for themselves, and when they do ask they face social repercussions for coming across as too demanding/unlikeable/unwomanly. The why of all of this is tricky to untangle, but it appears to be real, and appears to be learned rather than innate behavior.”
Yes. And when girls or women are politely assertive and reasonable and are routinely ignored or insulted they tend to: give up, become passive-aggressive or speak up more boisterously than before. Given this state of affairs, it would seem unwise to judge a woman as demanding or unlikeable without attempting to understand her experience, i.e., asking questions, engaging in conversation. But that would take time, and most people don’t consider such endeavors worth their time.
February 7th, 2011 at 9:57 am
I wanted to quickly say how much I appreciate the reasoned, intelligent, and measured responses this article in The Rumpus has generated. Most of the comments I’ve read in other blogs writing about the same or similar issue have been dismissive (claiming that counting bylines is a frivolous activity) and sexist (claiming that actively seeking out more women writers would lower the standards of whichever magazine). The comments here represent the type of positive debate one would hope from readers/writers/editors who care about both the quality of the writing and the diversity of authorship.
VIDA, from my understanding, is opening up the conversation about gender inequity in publishing by posting the bald facts. From their site: “We are no longer guessing if the world is flat or round; we are wondering how to get from point A to B now that the rules of navigation are public and much clearer.” When women complain (as we’ve been doing for decades) about sexism (implicit or explicit) in the workplace, the common dismissive criticism is that anecdotal evidence isn’t proof. Where are the numbers? It’s striking to me that when an organization like VIDA does provide numbers, the immediate response is that these numbers don’t say much of anything without more numbers. These numbers may be shocking, but they’re not impressive enough without more data to back this data up. Counting the number of books published in 2010 by every house in the US and then comparing those numbers by genre to match the genres typically reviewed by each of the magazines counted by VIDA would take some time–though I agree it would be great to have that data too, for sure. Calling them out for incomplete data doesn’t, in itself, provide the missing numbers. Perhaps we could help VIDA out by helping them count. Or by doing the follow-up work to take their conversation-starter to another, more investigative level. Or by backing up future inquiry using their grounding stats. Or by donating to their cause to help them keep counting. If they lit the torch, then it’s up to those of us who find these numbers concerning to carry the torch along to further inquiry and positive change.
February 7th, 2011 at 12:51 pm
Heather– Agreed that subject matter is part of it. However I have to say that I will read great writing pretty much regardless of the subject. Because *great* writing is rare.
Lara–
RE this:
“It can cost a lot to confront someone with their (even unwitting, and maybe especially unwitting) use of violent language, of committing violence by failing to see that someone else is having a different, less fair, more narrowed, more difficult life experience because of a category like gender, race, class, sexual orientation, ethnicity, and especially because of how that category is both lived and *seen* (or not seen) in a particular society.”
Yes. When I read your comment it brought to mind William T. Vollmann’s excellent book Poor People, in which he poses a question about what poverty is, how it is experienced and defined by various people worldwide. He goes far afield and talks to people, finds out how they live, renders the unseen seen. And beautifully. Perhaps someone could write a similar book about sexism? Who is the female equivalent of Vollmann? Or maybe a man could write the book? Think big I say–and with plenty of detail, minutiae, marginalia, footnotes. Even a pop-up version might work. And of course the hyper-super-pop-up web version could contain audio and video.
February 9th, 2011 at 12:50 pm
From http://htmlgiant.com/random/bitches-be-trippin/:
“Whenever this conversation, this tiresome talk of women and men and fairness and parity, comes up, everyone immediately becomes defensive and morphs into statistical experts, trying to find ways to discredit the numbers or to manifest parity when clearly there is little or none. People belittle the issue, make jokes, dismiss the problem, offer pithy commentary, and otherwise avoid engaging the issue in any sort of meaningful way.”
Sound familiar, Stephen et al? Yeah, I thought so.
February 9th, 2011 at 3:06 pm
Another thoughtful response to the VIDA study:
http://margotmagowan.wordpress.com/2011/02/09/why-the-gender-bias-in-the-media/
February 12th, 2011 at 4:55 pm
Too bad I missed the initial discussion (must’ve been too worried about leaving for AWP a day early to beat snowstorm…), but I want to comment anyway because there’s a lot of talk about counting up submissions as a way of determining the relative bias of a particular publication.
However, BEFORE ONE SUBMITS, ONE EXAMINES THE PUBLICATION/PUBLISHER AND CONSIDERS HER CHANCES OF BEING ACCEPTED. Sorry to yell.
But if a woman reviews the catalog of a press or list of contributors and sees that MOST OF THE FOLKS ON THE LIST ARE MEN, she may decide NOT TO SUBMIT IN THE FIRST PLACE. There I go yelling again. Sorry.
Last summer I was looking for places to submit my novella. I went to the web sites of many presses that I like to find out if they publish novellas. If they did not publish novellas, I did not submit to them. Imagine my delight when I found that Melville House has not one but two series on the novella! I scanned their catalog to see who/what they were publishing, to see if my novella might be a fit. As I clicked through their many pages, I grew less and less hopeful about the fit, but I was not sure why.
That’s when I realized: almost all the books were by men. I did some of my own calculations just to be sure. Turns out, 83% OF THEIR BOOKS WERE BY MEN. (Last time yelling. Promise.) Of all the 132 books counted in June 2010, 110 were by men and 22 by women.
Guess what I did: I blogged about it. Broke down the different categories and percentages.
Guess what I didn’t do: submit my novella to Melville House.
Smart writers are smart submitters. We don’t send flash fiction to journals that don’t publish flash fiction. We don’t send realist work to experimental/hybrid journals. We don’t send fiction to poetry journals. And if we’re women, we may not bother to submit to journals that publish mostly men.
February 12th, 2011 at 10:10 pm
Aside from the slight increase in administrative work, is there any good argument against internally anonymising unsolicited submissions so those assessing the quality of the work are, as much as is feasible, unaware of the author’s gender? It’s no guarantee of numerical parity between genders, but “elimination of bias” rather than achieving such parity seems like the appropriate goal.
February 13th, 2011 at 10:34 am
PM,
That assumes that there’s an objective standard of “good” work, and the problem is that in many ways, we’ve been conditioned to accept that what is traditionally considered masculine is the standard for goodness. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if a journal using an anonymized submission system ended up with an even greater disparity of men to women writers, because the selectors wouldn’t be challenging their assumptions about what’s good anymore (assuming they were doing so in the first place).
February 13th, 2011 at 10:55 am
Brian Spears – it doesn’t assume any objective standard for “good” work, only that whatever standard one chooses to use ought to be independent of the author’s gender, which I think is reasonable (otherwise, you’re saying that sometimes a work ought to be published when an identical work by an author of a different gender ought not to be.)
A selector can consider works whose content is outside what they might normally accept without ever knowing the author’s gender.
February 13th, 2011 at 11:30 am
PM,
If I were having to choose between two pieces that I thought were equally good but only had room for one, and they were written by people of different genders, I’d probably go with the woman, simply because the disparity has been so bad for so long, and I don’t want to be part of the reason it continues to exist. Does that make me a bad editor? Some would undoubtedly say so. I say those people can go get bent, because we don’t work in a vacuum where things like gender inequity don’t exist.
It’s all well and good to say that “whatever standard one chooses to use ought to be independent of the author’s gender,” but the reality is that that’s been the supposed standard for a really long time now, and the gender disparity is not improving. What that says to me is that editors have let unconscious biases creep in–notice I’m not accusing anyone of bad faith here. There are, without question, sexist editors who automatically devalue anything written by women, but I like to work under the assumption that most of them aren’t, and I base that on the fact that a fair number of women editors have recently looked at their own numbers and found that they favor male writing. But I think the only way we can challenge those unconscious biases is if we force ourselves to do so, and hiding behind an anonymized submission system only makes it easier for us to refuse to do that hard work.
February 13th, 2011 at 11:56 am
Brian – while it’s not something I’d want to do on principle, I think your “all else being equal” scenario when there’s only one available slot is actually reasonably compatible with largely anonymised submissions; don’t look at the author’s gender unless you’re down to more or less flipping a coin to decide, then maybe do so. Though are you sure you’d feel comfortable emailing “J. Smith” to say that you’re trying to decide whether to publish their work, and could they please help you out by telling you whether they’re John or Jane? I imagine you’d get some rather testy replies from both sexes on whether that ought to matter.
The thing about the biases you mention is that if all you know is the content of the work, then whatever biases occur are based on that. And being biased on content is what publishers are *supposed* to do. Some of the criteria may be somewhat objective (“Bad grammar”), others much less so (“not really our kind of thing”) but none of them inherently exclude people on the basis of their gender; it’s all about what you write. We agree that discrimination on the basis of gender is bad, but you seem to be saying that discrimination on content (which is always necessary) is suddenly bad if the criteria used happen to *correlate* with gender.
Which I think is a very shaky case. If it’s acceptable for the Hypothetical Journal of Horror to not really like vampire stories (and of course they ought to say so in their submission guidelines if so) is that somehow fine if such stories are written 50/50 by gender but not if it’s 70/30?
I think your point that well-meaning people can have subconcious biases is an important and very relevant one. An editor who wants to view Jane Smith’s work by exactly the same standards as John Smith’s may still not do so, unless you force them to by not telling them if it’s John or Jane’s. I worry that one reason people aren’t willing to make what seems such a simple and effective step is because of confusing “unbiased reviewing” with “numerical parity”, and hence being reluctant to forbid themselves from imposing the latter. Which I think is shooting oneself in the foot.
February 13th, 2011 at 1:28 pm
I think you’re missing my point, PM, which is that we’ve been programmed our entire lives to think that what is masculine is what is good, especially when masculine equals strong. It’s something we’ve internalized from our earliest days of reading (which is why I’m careful not to ascribe bad intent to editors here), and so if all we go on is the content, chances are we’re merely reinforcing those biases. And anonymizing submissions allows us to avoid that, because we can tell ourselves that we’re simply going on what we think is the best work, without ever questioning ourselves as to why we think something is better than something else.
And that’s why I think talk of standards kind of misses the point. There are no standards by which we judge literature–there’s gut feeling which we then rationalize after the fact. And we can’t modify our gut feelings unless we acknowledge that they’re what’s driving us as opposed to some rational argument of quality. The experience of literature is an aesthetic one, in which our senses come alive. Putting a yardstick next to individual poems and measuring them by some imaginary set of standards suggests the opposite to me–an anesthetic experience, in which the senses are dulled and the experience is muted in service of some defined rationale. I want editors to be honest about how their aesthetics are coming into play when they select pieces to print, and I want them to question those aesthetics constantly, and I don’t think you can do that if you presume that there’s some mystical standard of “good writing” that can be judged in an unbiased way. The more information you have about the author, the better, I say, because in the end we’re not just publishing stories and poems and essays–we’re publishing people.
February 13th, 2011 at 2:08 pm
Brian – I think you may be mischaracterising my position. I am not claiming that there exists a perfect objective yardstick that editors ought to be using, some provably ideal assessment of “good” that can be striven for and ultimately achieved. Assessment is, as you say, aesthetic and subjective.
But ultimately it has to happen: some things will get accepted, others rejected, and we would like there to be good reasons for the decision. And outside of the “flip a coin” scenario (which I think as discussed above is fairly peripheral and not too difficult to integrate) I think any personal characteristic of the author outside of their work (since, while the author and the work are of course related, it is, through anonymisation, perfectly feasible to consider them independently) is a bad reason to use.
You say that we consider the “masculine” good by default and should work to remove this bias. But, to the extent that a work by a male author is considered more “masculine”, anonymisation removes this factor. The only remaining bias under such circumstances would be in favour of inherently “masculine writing”, if there is such a thing. Arguably such a bias would be no worse than one in favour of, say, short sentences or extensive descriptions, which I don’t think it would be unreasonable for a journal to exhibit if that’s what they preferred. But that aside, if you can identify masculine and feminine writing (independent of the author’s gender) and want more of the latter, then you can simply implement that preference for *content* without ever knowing the author’s gender, and let the demographics fall where they may.
You appear to be saying that a holistic process which weights both the author’s work and their gender is appropriate, and yet a bias in favour of males (i.e. a weighting on gender) is bad and to be avoided. I’m not sure how this works except in the case that you consider parity in numbers an inherent good independent of what content results (and even if a gender-biased process is required to achieve it). If so, we may simply have a fundamental disagreement.
To perhaps sum up my argument and return briefly to the issue of subconscious gender bias, we both agree that such bias is subtle and hard to eliminate through good intentions. But your case seems to be that “fairness” by some definition (is it simply numerical parity?) can be achieved by introducing *just the right amount* of opposite overt gender bias on top of the subtle kind. I am very sceptical of the efficacy of this (as well as being opposed to such bias on principle), and arguing that a far better approach is to give the subtle kind as little opportunity as possible to be exercised.
February 13th, 2011 at 4:09 pm
“Let the demographics fall where they may.”
Isn’t that the reason the situation is the way it is right now? My point is that all that anonymisation does is give the editors a fig leaf to hide behind without ever forcing them to think about why they like what they like. And yes, I think a bias toward male writers is a bad thing, because men–and I include myself in this equation–have gotten the benefit of the doubt for thousands of years now when it comes to being judged on anything, including the quality of the art we create. As an artist, I want my work to be judged against the best out there, not just against my fellow males, and I think that editors who, consciously or unconsciously, limit the competitive field are doing me and my fellow male writers a disservice.
I also dispute the notion that working toward parity will result in an inferior product (which is what I think you’re getting at when you write “in the case that you consider parity in numbers an inherent good independent of what content results”–if I’m misreading that, then correct me, please). My position is that there are at least as many women putting out outstanding work as their are men, and so if an editor is favoring men over women in a journal, said editor needs to work a little harder to find good work by women, and what’s more, maybe said editor needs to examine his or her preferences and ask why there’s such a lean toward men.
February 13th, 2011 at 5:01 pm
Brian – I think there is a fairly crucial difference between a situation where someone can be potentially rejected (all good editorial intentions aside) purely because of their gender (i.e. someone of the opposite gender submitting the same work would have been accepted) and one where it can only happen because of their writing (for all that the features of someone’s writing may be correlated with gender). Anonymity ensures the latter and is neither a fig leaf nor equivalent to the status quo.
Consider your position that “there are at least as many women putting out outstanding work as their are men”. You’re certain of that, across all possible subfields that a journal might specialise in? That’s an extremely strong assumption. Must the world contain precisely as many women as men writing, say, outstanding war stories, or accounts of raising children? This is not to deny that one could no doubt find excellent examples of both from both genders, but that’s not the same as saying that the numbers *must* be equal. And if you would concede that they might not be under such “obvious” circumstances as the above, why assume it in less obvious cases? Correlations can be surprising.
And just to stress, the alternative is *not* to assume or accept that genre A will inevitably be male-dominated or genre B female dominated (perhaps women are writing 90% of the outstanding war stories, the point above was that a disproportionality was plausible), but to refrain from making any such assumptions. And unless you make that assumption, it does not follow from “our numbers aren’t equal” that “we must be unfairly discriminating on gender”. In the anonymised situation, a gender disparity in acceptances tells you only that the kind of *work* you accept is disproportionately submitted by one gender over another.
Acceptance criteria can be a subjective aesthetic judgement but there seems no good reason to say that the only good criteria are ones which turn out to result in gender parity in acceptances (especially, though not exclusively, when there’s no such parity in submissions).
February 13th, 2011 at 5:07 pm
Oh, and just to add, if you believe the reason for a low number of acceptances for one gender is due to outstanding authors from that gender being unlikely to submit their work (a scenario I find perfectly plausible), then encouraging such authors to do so is completely compatible with anonymised submissions.
February 13th, 2011 at 7:20 pm
You’re certain of that, across all possible subfields that a journal might specialise in? That’s an extremely strong assumption.
Indeed it would be, if I’d said that. But this conversation has been done completely in the context of creative writing, and yes, I am prepared to say that in the general world of creative writing that there are at least as many good women writers as there are men, and actually, I don’t think that’s a particularly controversial position to take.
A couple of posts ago, you suggested we have a fundamental disagreement on this issue. I’m willing to grant that at this point.
February 13th, 2011 at 7:51 pm
Brian – yes, I think we may have exhausted the topic a bit. As a final comment: I think that if you have a skewed demographic of acceptances it’s a good idea to try to understand why, because knowing what if anything to do about it will depend on why. Are the low acceptances due to low submissions, bias against the author’s gender, bias against their work? Is the latter an issue of quality or something else? Are the current criteria for “quality” good ones? Anonymity, I think, cuts out one potential source of bias without hurting anything else, and helps clarify the above reasons.
Anyway, thanks for the discussion.
February 15th, 2011 at 12:48 pm
Brian, you are wonderfully persistent! As is PM …
The Rumpus directed me to the following excellent piece, which I think is worth knitting into this thread as well:
http://www.theawl.com/2011/02/being-female