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Join NOW!The 2014 VIDA Count is in, this time including the first annual Women of Color VIDA Count. While the results of the VIDA Count show a general trend toward gender parity, the results of the WOC VIDA Count, though incomplete, are disheartening. Jamia Wilson, executive director of Women, Action, and the Media!, speaks to the […]
...moreSo where does this leave us? I think back to “The Woman Question.” I have (most days) not felt the need to leave my husband and children in order to safeguard my sanity, so that is progress of a sort, I concede. But what about the dichotomy I once posed for my students: heir-producing arm […]
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When I walked into the cool, airy space, I was nervous and immediately fascinated by the work, a double nervousness.
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In Episode 7 of The Rumpus Late Nite Poetry Show, Dave Roderick talks with poet Erin Belieu about her new collection, Slant Six, her work with VIDA, and how we’re all just onions.
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In Episode 6 of The Rumpus Late Nite Poetry Show, Dave Roderick chats with poet Oliver de la Paz about his new collection, Post Subject: A Fable, video games, and his weirdest writing habit.
...moreMitt Romney ignited a feminist revolution during the 2012 presidential debates when he said, “I went to a number of women’s groups and said: ‘Can you help us find folks?’ And they brought us whole binders full of women.” Throw VIDA’s pie charts highlighting “gender disparity in major literary publications and book reviews” into the mix, and you’ll […]
...moreVIDA is launching a new roundtable discussion series on issues in writing by women on June 2nd at Housing Works Bookstore in Manhattan. The event is the first of a series that will take place every fall and winter/spring. This time, they conversation centers on how women write about other women, featuring a panel including Jill Lepore, Rebecca […]
...moreLiterature and commercial publishing have a diversity problem. People of color and women are both in short supply. Rumpus contributor Daniel Peña, writing at Plougshares, offers a market-based explanation: But I wonder how much these problems stem not from MFA whiteness, or the MFA system, or even publishing at large, but from the very narratives […]
...moreAs VIDA’s annual stats have made very clear, most publications favor male writers reviewing books by other male writers. Our inimitable essays editor Roxane Gay has also talked about the lack of representation of writers of color in many publications. Ron Hogan, who runs the literary website Beatrice, wants to help change that by starting a […]
...moreAs we’ve documented pretty extensively before, arts organization VIDA has done a lot to expose gender inequality in the writing world with its annual count comparing female bylines to male ones in a number of publications. The New York Review of Books‘ ratio has been less than stellar for the past three years, with female reviewers and female authors […]
...moreWe’ve written a fair amount about this year’s VIDA numbers. We even featured an essay by Andrew Ervin, a writer who realized he was part of the problem—only 23.5% of the books he had reviewed during his career were by women. The London Review of Books is, by VIDA’s reckoning, one of the worst offenders: only about 25% […]
...morePoet, memoirist, and Beat figure Hettie Jones is, like most of us, unhappy about sexism in the publishing industry. In a blog post on the subject, she discusses VIDA statistics, Deborah Copaken Kogan’s Nation essay, and (drumroll!) Elissa Bassist’s amazing Funny Women essay “Writing the Next Great American Woman’s Novel.” Jones calls Bassist’s humor “indelible” and […]
...moreAre male and female writers interviewed equally? Loraine Berry at Talking Writing thinks not. It’s gone to show that interviewers are often more interested in a female writer’s dietary habits and marital problems than their literary processes and work. Jodi Picoult says that she has been asked how she lost weight many, many times. Jennifer […]
...moreThis year’s VIDA stats gave us a (depressing) wide-lens view of women’s status in the writing industry, but for a (depressing) close-up perspective, read Deborah Copaken Kogan’s recent essay in The Nation about the sexism she’s encountered during her career as a photographer and writer. It’s a good example of that stomach-dropping mix of “Did they seriously do […]
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I’ve done the math and it turns out that I’m part of the problem.
...moreWe reached out to several of the worst offenders to ask where they thought they had gone wrong…but got very little in the way of responses. So we decided, instead, to reach out to the editors of the publications that actually had managed to show a relatively gender-equitable byline distribution in 2012. Flavorwire talks to […]
...moreVIDA, the organization that tracks the status of women in the writing world, has posted their annual count of female writers published in major literary magazines in comparison to male writers published in the same places. This year, they’ve posted side-by-side statistics for 2010, 2011, and 2012, all in easily readable bar-graph form. The upshot: […]
...moreOn her blog today, respected critic Ruth Franklin wrote an open letter to the editors of Bookforum. She writes: I have considered opting out of writing for magazines at which women are not represented among the top editors, such as Bookforum. But such a policy would naturally be counter to my stated intent. So I’ve resolved to […]
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Let’s talk about boobs.
...moreOver at The Awl, Eileen Myles shares her thoughts on seeing the VIDA pie graphs. She tells us that writing by women is inherently more interesting: “Why? Because the female reality is still largely unknown. And language is the thrill that holds the unknown in its vague and shifting ways. That’s writing.”
...moreBefore 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 […]
...more“I do not believe that apparent authoritative literary voices of validation would ever make such a grand claim about a novel written by a woman. I say this because I believe there are many novels by women that are about the same sort of world as presented in Freedom. Sadly, the culture usually calls these […]
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Two female writers from VIDA: Women in Literary Arts crunch the numbers and let us know how The Rumpus is doing in the gender disparity department.
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