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That's the question that occurs to me as I read Glamour Editor Ruth Davis Konigsberg's "WomenTK" report that five so-called "thought-leader" magazines print one story written by a woman for every three stories they print by men.
You can read her numbers here -- some performances are worse (Harper's publishes seven stories by men for every one by a woman) and others are better (NYT Magazine and The Atlantic, but the latter forces me to read Caitlin Flanagan, so take their score with a dash of acid).
But wait, the bad news continues: Don't assume that the women who do get published are writing on the war in Iraq, or America's spending deficit, or how to recruit the best engineering talent from abroad. Think again, as Konigsburg shares a depressing email from a friend:
As a former editor at The New Yorker wrote me in an e-mail, “in addition to counting bylines, you should look at what women are allowed to write about. I’ve been struck by a pattern, at The Atlantic in particular, where women only seem to write about marriage, motherhood and nannies, obsessively so. If you count the number of women’s bylines there that weren’t about hearth and home, the number would approach zero.â€
Sorry, not done -- the news is perhaps worst in progressive magazines, notes Ann Friedman of AlterNet and Feministing in her stinging piece, The Byline Gender Gap:
As things stand, at most publications the ratio of male-to-female contributing writers looks even worse than the byline ratio, which is saying something:
The American Prospect: 21:12
The Atlantic: 27:6
Harper's: 30:2 (masthead not online)
In These Times: 6:6
Mother Jones: 10:5
The New Yorker: 44:18
The Nation: 26:4
The New Republic: 12:2
Salon: 14:7
Slate: 20:6
Washington Monthly: 30:5It's worth noting that many magazines bestow the "contributing writer/editor" title on writers they want to honor, not necessarily those whose stories they publish frequently. Regardless, the numbers are telling. Especially because outlets with women at the helm -- the Nation and Salon, for example -- have ratios that are just as bad or worse than publications with male editors-in-chief.
Okay, I'm done. Now I'd like to get back to my original question. Because, while frustrating as hell, these numbers are not exactly new -- indeed, Pat Arnow cites her 2004 piece on The New York Times in comments on Friedman's piece. I have read oodles of such surveys about newspapers, magazines and broadcast newsrooms over the years.
So I question whether this trend will ever affect mainstream publishing's bottom-line, the best way I know of to get an editor's attention. Is there any chance that these publications will lose the women readers that advertisers seek to reach?
- Will we women keep reading magazines that don't publish us?
- Will these publications continue to maintain their interest for women readers if they don't have women writing for them? (Time, Inc. says print is bleeding male readers, not females, according to BusinessWeek Online. Then again, I think it depends on the magazine.)
- And while you're at it, what do you make of Friedman's recommendation: "it's time for editors to step up and make it a written policy to assign a percentage of stories to female writers." Many folks in the comments are invoking the q-word (quotas)...
