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Angry feminist writers make me happy

Jill

Heather Mallick is my new favorite person. In her latest column, she goes after Harper’s editor Roger Hodge, and criticizes the sexism of the magazine industry:

Last year, an American website, www.WomenTK.com, began tracking the ratio of male to female writers in Harper’s, The Atlantic, The NYT Magazine, The New Yorker and Vanity Fair. Arguably, the ratio should be more or less one to one because that’s what life is like. As it turned out:

* Vanity Fair 2.7:1.
* The New Yorker 4.1:1.
* The Atlantic 3.6:1.
* Harper’s 6.9:1 (118 male bylines, only 17 female). Fully six of its 12 issues from September ’05 to August ’06 had one or no female writers.

The numbers, as Ruth Davis Konigsberg of WomenTK writes, prove Ursula K. Le Guin’s remark that “when women speak more than 30 per cent of the time, men perceive them as dominating the conversation.”

Blogger Dennis Loy Johnson of MobyLives.com wrote scathingly in 2002 (so no change there then) of the catastrophically single-sex New Yorker. He then reported that women and men had reacted in different ways. Women wrote to thank him for noticing what they had seen for years. Men became angry and defensive. “Hey, The Atlantic is just as bad!” they’d say. There were other excuses. Shouldn’t it come down to the best writing, male editors would ask. Yes, wrote Johnson, but why should 80% of the best writing be male?

Weirdly, five years later, Hodge says the same thing. When I emailed him this week to ask him how the March issue of Harper’s came to be all-male, he said a number of things in response to my “intemperate” letter. (What nonsense. My letter positively seethed and rightly so.) “In fairness,” he wrote, “you have to admit that the days when Harper’s would go months without a female contributor have been over for a long time.” Hodge is utterly wrong, as the figures show.

He then described how he edits. “I had plenty of pieces by women on hand, in various states in the editorial process, but most of them didn’t quite fit together thematically. I did have one originally scheduled for the March issue but we had to hold it for one reason or another, completely unrelated to the fact that she can give birth.”

Right. Read the whole thing.

Thanks to Katy for sending this on.

21 thoughts on Angry feminist writers make me happy

  1. I love Heather Mallick so much, I’m glad to see she’s getting some attention down south! Her column is probably the only reason I still kick about at cbc.ca.

  2. Of course, a fair amount of the comments on her article are pretty disgusting, especially those saying that because Cosmo has alot of female writers, we shouldn’t complain that Harper’s doesnt.

    Right. Like you can even compare the two…

  3. I did have one originally scheduled for the March issue but we had to hold it for one reason or another, completely unrelated to the fact that she can give birth.

    Wow, that doesn’t sound defensive. Or suspicious.

  4. I don’t know if it would make anyone feel any better to point out that some of the best, most memorable New Yorker writers, like Elizabeth Kolbert and Susan Orlean, are women.

  8. I don’t know if it would make anyone feel any better to point out that some of the best, most memorable New Yorker writers, like Elizabeth Kolbert and Susan Orlean, are women.

    Well, they’d kinda have to be top tier writers to make it in even though they have ovaries, so I’m not surprised at all.

  9. I can’t say I’m terribly surprised. Ever since I read Debbie Taylor’s article Three Cures for Mslexia I’ve been pretty grumpy about the state of gender equity in publishing. It’s well worth reading, especially if you are a writer, but if a synopsis were attempted, it might be “Women read more and writer more, but men are published more and win overwhelmingly more prizes. Three possible culprits are cited: lack of time, lack of confidence, and lack of a fair reading.”

  10. This is not a “whiny response.”

    To support your case, you need to present statistics on the number of female authors who have had good stories (ones quickly published elsewhere) rejected by Harper’s, or who have been denied article assignments by the editors.

    An equally plausible explanation for your statistics is simple and more plausible: like you, female authors are turned off by the incessantly depressing writing in Harper’s and by the lack of female role models publishing in the magazine, and choose to take their writing elsewhere. This sort of thing can easily become self-perpetuating.

    In the sciences, we have a catchphrase worth bearing in mind: “correlation does not imply causality”. Your assertion may well be correct, but you’ll need to provide real evidence to support it, not just a headcount of published articles.

    —Geoff Hart

  11. Sorry, I’m sympathetic to about 99% of the issues posted on this board, but this one leaves me cold. When I read the New Yorker or any other magazine, I want to read good articles, and I don’t care if they’re written by men, women or hermaphrodites.

    (I have to add, though, that I also dropped my Harper’s subscription, for exactly the same reasons Mallick cites.)

  12. good stories (ones quickly published elsewhere) rejected by Harper’s

    First of all, that’s not going to help if all the other publications have the same bias.

    Second of all (and I’m not characterizing your post as a whiny response) your understanding of the way publishing works is inaccurate. I’m in the sciences too — I switched fields after becoming disgusted with the clubby, nepotistic nature of journalism. Magazines like Harper’s (I interned at one of them) do not operate like academic journals, taking submissions, reading them all and accepting those they deem to be the best. Very little of what they publish is from unsolicited submissions. They ask their favorite writers, or their friends, for articles. Given that, it’s very hard to prove any kind of bias by looking at rejected submissions.

  13. Sorry, I’m sympathetic to about 99% of the issues posted on this board, but this one leaves me cold. When I read the New Yorker or any other magazine, I want to read good articles, and I don’t care if they’re written by men, women or hermaphrodites.

    I think we all agree that we want to read good atricles regardless of the sex, race, age…etc of the writer. However, as things stand, are you trying to tell me you do not believe women are capable of producing these quality articles, therefore the number of women writing for magazines such as Harpers and the New Yorker reflects women’s abilities as writers? Or is it more likely to be a reflection of our mysogynist society, which is what Heather Mallick is in fact addressing.

  14. Very little of what they publish is from unsolicited submissions. They ask their favorite writers, or their friends, for articles. Given that, it’s very hard to prove any kind of bias by looking at rejected submissions.

    And that’s a great way of denying that there’s any bias while still perpetuating bias, isn’t it?

  15. …are you trying to tell me you do not believe women are capable of producing these quality articles, therefore the number of women writing for magazines such as Harpers and the New Yorker reflects women’s abilities as writers?

    Of course I believe women are capable of writing for the New Yorker, Harper’s or any other publication (see my comment #4). As for why the number of writers published in those magazines don’t exactly mirror the gender proportions in the general population (or among established magazine writers), I don’t have an explanation, except maybe for the vagaries of chance. After all, a series of coin flips won’t always turn out exactly 50% heads, 50% tails, even though that’s statistically what’s most likely to happen.

    I’ve worked in publishing my entire adult life, and one thing I’ve noticed is that it tends to be a gender-neutral field. (On the editorial side, that is. Sales is another matter.)

    The15th was correct in that most editors tend to seek out writers they know for assignments. Sometime these people are formalized on the masthead as “contributing” writers or editors. The most sophisticated (i.e., richest) mags will put such writers under contract, for a certain number of pieces over a given time period.

    One of the biggest challenges for every editor is finding writers who are capable of doing things the way the editor wants them done, and who are consistently available to do them. Such writers are rare and treasured. What I’m trying to say is that any editor who cut himself off from half the Earth’s population in the quest for such valuable creatures, out of sexism, would be cutting his own throat.

    I’m not saying that sexism is unknown among magazine editors. They are human, after all, and subject to all the character flaws and prejudices that afflict the human race as a whole. What I’m trying to say, at the risk of being called a cockeyed optimist, is that given the nature of publishing, there are very real and strong forces working against sexism in article assignments, and that those forces will prevail over the long run.

  16. And that’s a great way of denying that there’s any bias while still perpetuating bias, isn’t it?

    Yes, it is. There’s no law against a male editor talking almost exclusively to male journalists at parties (except that hawt 19-year-old intern!) and then saying, “That guy I met at the launch party seemed to have a pretty good handle on biotech, and we were thinking of a science cover story this month…” And there’s no way to prove it. These publications will never allow any transparency in the way they decide what to publish.

  17. I’d be very curious to hear the Harper’s editor elaborate on this:

    I had plenty of pieces by women on hand, in various states in the editorial process, but most of them didn’t quite fit together thematically.

    What was the theme, “What it’s Like to Have a Penis”?

    And Bitter Scribe, I think that quoted statement blows your theory about “vagaries of chance” right out of the water. He had “plenty of pieces by women,” but chose not to run them for one reason or another. What are the chances that when Roger Hodge makes his editorial decisions every month, he gets this result, just by chance:

    Harper’s 6.9:1 (118 male bylines, only 17 female). Fully six of its 12 issues from September ‘05 to August ‘06 had one or no female writers.

  18. OK, red, maybe the Harper’s guy is a jerk. (I wasn’t all that keen on Lapham, either, which is one reason I let my subscription lapse.) But I still contend that, taken as a whole, publishing is one of the more enlightened professions in terms of gender fairness.

  19. “It could be worse!” is hardly a ringing defense of the profession.

    and that those forces will prevail over the long run

    You know what Keynes said about the long run.

  21. BitterScribe wrote:
    Sorry, I’m sympathetic to about 99% of the issues posted on this board, but this one leaves me cold. When I read the New Yorker or any other magazine, I want to read good articles, and I don’t care if they’re written by men, women or hermaphrodites.

    Either you are an misogynist or you are dumb.
    If women are as capeable as men to write good article the slant in bylines means that you are to a large degree reading substandart articles because editors are sexists.

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