Before VIDA released its latest count, there was Ann Hays’ open letter to The New Yorker complaining about the dearth of women in its pages, and I remember applauding the letter while thinking the whole time that it wouldn’t matter if the conversation didn’t somehow jump into the mainstream. And I worried that the same thing would happen to VIDA’s count. I mean, we had a nice discussion here, but we’ve been fans of VIDA since they started their work, so it should be no surprise that we were willing to continue the conversation.
But it’s starting to look like more people at bigger publications are paying attention now. Here’s some of the latest offerings from around the web.
Katha Pollitt at Slate says we need more women editors.
Roxane Gay is trippin’ and rightly so.
Jim Behrle has some suggestions for fixing the problem.
Jessica Crispin talks to Christian Wiman of Poetry about the subject. The world of poetry, it seems to me, is the area in literature where women are the closest to parity.
Annie Finch has solid advice for editors on how to get more women in their pages.
And I’m just going to add this, which I said in the comments in our own discussion on the subject, and which I’ve heard reiterated in most of these pieces–if you’re an editor, then you have a duty to aim for parity. Don’t blame the slush pile–do something about it. It’s difficult, I know, and in a lot of cases, we’re doing this work for no money or next to it, and being asked to track what you accept seems like an additional pain in the ass for an under-appreciated (by the public at large anyway) job. But it’s important to do all the same. Don’t run from the responsibility.
5 responses
Rob Spillman’s response at Tin House: On Gender, Numbers. and Submissions.
http://www.tinhouse.com/blog/6993/on-gender-numbers-submissions.html
Thanks for this Brian. I was just wondering this morning where one might find such a round up.
No problem. Some days I feel my talents are meager, but throwing together a roundup is among them.
Thanks for this extended coverage. I replied yesterday to your previous thread, but was rather late to the discussion and it’s buried under a lot of great posts. My main point, which I’d like to reassert here, was that the slush pile may not be the first place to start when assessing potential disparities in the percentage of women published. Typically a publisher’s catalog tells even more than the submission guidelines about what the editors will publish. For example, I wanted to send a novella to Melville House but realized (counted) that 83% of their books are by men. And many of the 17% women are dead. So I didn’t bother to submit.
As I concluded in my previous post: 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.
I like what Roxane had to say. For the approach I’ve taken with my magazine, we don’t publish an issue unless at least half of the contributors are women. We also call ourselves a feminist publication. Perhaps that makes us more inviting to women. This works for us.
http://www.weavemagazine.net/2011/02/origin-of-name-weave-diversity-and.html
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