In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

I’m so utterly shocked

Ashley

Apparently a new study shows that academics chosen to write op-eds for three major newspapers are overwhelmingly male.  The Wall Street Journal was the worst of the bunch, with 97% of their op-eds by academics written by men.

The study doesn’t get into the fact that this gender bias isn’t limited to op-eds by academics. At the New York Times (which features 82% male writers of op-eds by academics), two out of 11 regular op-ed columnists are women. At the Washington Post, two out of 16 columnists are women.

Now, I don’t necessarily think that having more women write op-eds would be helpful to women. New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd is a woman, and her ramblings seem to alternately expound on how ridiculous she thinks other women are and questioning the masculinity of any man who doesn’t act like a complete asshole. However, I do think that this extreme disparity shows that editors buy into the cultural belief that when men write, what they have to say is more important than what women have to say. As this overview of the climate for women in academia notes:

In one study, first done in 1968 and then replicated in 1983, college students were asked to rate identical articles to specific criteria. The authors’ names attached to the articles were clearly male or female, but were reversed for each group of raters: what one group thought had been written by a male, the second group thought had been written by a female, and vice versa. Articles supposedly written by women were consistently ranked lower than when the very same articles were thought to have been written by a male.

So basically, if you’ve got a woman’s name, you’ve got to write better than the men if you want to be considered as good. Add to that the fact that editors want to hear about “important” issues and not “trivial” ones like us ladies are so concerned about (you know, “women’s issues”), and you get 90% of your editorials written by men.

I have a theory that the last jobs to be democratized to include oppressed people are those that hold the most power, and getting to control cultural dialogue and representations is one of the biggest kinds of power you can get. That’s why women never get to direct movies and it was so imperative for white corporateland to co-opt and gain control of popular hip hop.

These biases are replicated in the world of intertubes too. There are more women blogging than men, but go ahead and check out the blogroll and rec list on any blog that isn’t specifically devoted to feminism/womanism.

It might be a fun project to force various forms of media to include women’s voices at a 50-50 ratio. In the meantime, I’ll be getting ignored over here on the feminist blogs until I can attain the brilliance of Nicholas Kristof’s gender analysis.*

*Note: I have no problem with Nicholas Kristof, who has recently taken an interest in violence against women and sexism.  I’m glad someone with the kind of visibility he has is addressing these issues.  We need allies, however imperfect.  What I have a problem with is the fact that dozens of women have made the points he is making, with more depth, nuance, eloquence, and understanding of interlocking oppressions, but they were ignored. 

18 thoughts on I’m so utterly shocked

  1. This is interesting. As a former scientist-turned-journalist, I’ve been actively trying to find sources who I can quote who are women. But I’ve found that women tend to be more cagey, to want to see what I’m going to quote beforehand, and just generally seem less willing to speak on a subject unless they are the unequivocal expert on it. (i.e. even if they’re knowledgeable about a subject, they have a higher bar for deciding what research is related enough to their work that they can comment.) I think this might be because they have to work much harder to prove themselves than their male counterparts, and they’ve jsut gotten so used to th expectation that they have to be better. So, they don’t want to be quoted saying something that is slightly not quite right, etc.

    Obviously, it seems to me that the main reason we don’t see more acawomen opeds is that editors aren’t seeking them out. But, I think there are difficulties even if you are determined to get a woman (we’ve been trying for two weeks to get a prominent woman to fill our comments section with little success.) It sucks though, because the preponderance of male voices from academia just reinforces our sexist assumptions.

  2. I am a female academic with a prior career as a journalist. Almost none of my freelance queries get even the courtesy of a response. Just one data point.

  3. Jill, you’ve been consistently posting interesting stuff lately, but I must disagree on a small point here. Your claim that whites co-opted hip-hop as part of a need on the part of the dominant class to comandeer forms of social expression seems needlessly complex. Parsimony dictates a much simpler and elegant explanation: the profit motive. Right or wrong, that is what drives the bulk of what businesses do.

  4. FYI, Jim, this post is by Ashley, not me. But I’m flattered that you would confuse her excellent writing for mine 🙂

  5. Jim–

    I think you’re confusing my statement about the co-optation of hip-hop with some sort of conspiracy theory where a bunch of dudes in robes with secret passwords decided that the hip-hop menace must be controlled… That’s not what I meant at all.

    The effect on hip-hop has to do with what white executives were comfortable with and what they knew how to market. The profit motive is by no means incompatible with systemic white supremacist patriarchal ideology.

  6. “I have a theory that the last jobs to be democratized to include oppressed people are those that hold the most power”

    You are correct. One example: I’ve research and published on gender bias and inequity in academia, and it’s the highest status, most elite institutions that are the worst offenders. My work and other research shows that there is a gender “discount” for women that devalues their work and also the positions they hold. That is, once a woman becomes chair of an important committee or department, that chair position is also seen as less important, less high status.

  7. Oops sorry Jill! Or should I say sorry Ash for confusing your interesting post for one of Jill’s?

    Thanks for clarifying Ashley. I’m still a bit unclear – are you saying that it’s not a conscious process on the part of elites (at least in the case of hip-hop) but it’s a natural outcome because the whites not relate to the experiences which helped create original hip-hop? That makes more sense than what I thought you were saying. Still, in your response you refer to white supremacy – are you defining that to include these sort of sub-conscious processes? Or were you just saying that 1) in case of hip-hop you have subconscious process which ignores minority perspectives and 2) you also have conscious racist ideology at work, and 1) and 2) are not mutually exclusive. Sorry – hope that question made sense!

  8. Yeah, not exaclty shocking, but certainly frustrating!

    I work for an independent investigative journalism magazine, where our editorial staff of 28 is half female, and our editors-in-chief are both female. So at least I can be pretty proud of my own company! There’s definitely no feeling that the pieces written by female employees are less important or less worthy of time – everyone is treated equally and everyone’s work is given equal attention and consideration.

    Totally agree on the Kristof issue – definitely illustrative of the problem.

  9. I know that I use a male name on my blog, and plan on using a male name if I ever get published. I haven’t had any sexual harassment or gendered insults hurled my way yet. It’s probably selling out, but…*slinks off*

  11. your points are good. I wonder though, what are the average ages of those op-ed writers at the journal and times? Perhaps theres just a larger pool of men in the field who would be eligible for writing at those kinds of papers in that age group. does that make any sense?

  12. Hey Jim,

    I would say that there is both unconscious and conscious racism going on, and that the near-total segregation of our country makes it difficult for white people to have much understanding of the experiences of people of color, and also that a lot of white people consciously hold beliefs and attitudes that they do not consider white supremacist, but objectively are. So, for example, going back to the 1980s, let’s say white executive #1 sees that hip-hop is a potential moneymaker, and tries to dominate the market without regard for the fact that he is gaining control over the voices in hip-hop. Because he lacks an understanding of white privilege and the tendency of white people to co-opt the voices of people of color, he just doesn’t worry about what he’s doing, or second guess himself.

    White executive #2 doesn’t like to market overly “political” hip-hop, because those artists are harder to control. He also isn’t sure how to market anti-racist sentiments to white people, because anti-racist sentiments make him uncomfortable and guilty. So he chooses to heavily promote gangsta rap over, say, Public Enemy. He also muzzles his political artists so much that their work loses its quality, and sees even lower record sales.

    White executive #3 sees that gangsta rap sold more than Public Enemy, so he signs more of this type of artist. Because he is comfortable with the idea of black men as criminals and unconcerned about promoting this stereotype, he chooses to continue this type of signing and marketing practice.

    White executive #4 has active contempt for black people, and believes that black men are criminals. Some other clueless white executive tells him that it is important for hip hop to be “real,” and since his idea of what the black experience is is a racist one, executive #4 replicates this in the artists he promotes, and pressures his artists to talk more about guns and violence.

    Once the toxic hip hop becomes mainstream, enough kids are bound to like it to ensure a steady stream of artists in the same mold.

    So it’s both conscious and unconscious processes, both market forces and the racist context that market forces operate in. While an anti-racist, anti-corporate artist could sell a lot of records, executives don’t agree with radical statements, so they can’t imagine that this could be the case. They also have no idea how to market such a thing, even though there is a demand for it.

    You only have to look at people like Immortal Technique or Ani DiFranco to see that even when an objective market demand does exist, corporate media is often unwilling to accept anti-oppression messages. Had they been signed to major record labels, I’m sure both of these artists would have been sanitized to the point where they would be unmarketable.

  13. Pingback: compositionists as public intellectuals | A Collage of Citations
  14. Pingback: Feministe » The Ivory Ceiling: How Academia Keeps Women Out

  15. We should probably also consider another factor in this – sexism within academia itself. While I’m certainly not about to defend media as not sexist, perhaps there are fewer op-eds written by femyle academics because there are also fewer femyle academics, sadly enough.

    The realm of academia is one of the most elitist communities and has made it extremely difficult for womyn to succeed. Just look to the statistics of womyn and men that are graduating… For undergraduate degrees, womyn actually outnumber men. However, when you get to Master’s degrees and especially PhD’s, men vastly outnumber womyn in many fields.

  16. Thanks Ash. I must say, I agree with what you say, although I’d wager that *most* is now unconscious, especially among younger people in power (this is from my own limited experience in the corporate world -I’m only 24). I have been shocked by how much institutionalized sexism/racism I’ve witnessed.

  17. I don’t dispute the main point- the media is sexist, things perceived as having been created/done by women are percieved more negatively, etc.- but I get the New York Times and your statistic isn’t telling the whole story. While it’s true that there are fewer woman columnists, I estimate that on any given page, there is likely to be 0.8 to 1 columns written by a woman- that is, if you average out the columns of Ms. Dowd and Ms. Collins combined, it’s about one per day.

    Is this a Good Thing? Depends. As you say, Dowd is not known for her gender progressivism, and almost one woman-written column per day is still only, like, 20% of each page.

  18. Have you read Supercrunchers? They reference a study they did seeing the quality of law papers published in journals and then seeing who wrote them. Women wrote on average higher quality papers (minority women even more), essentially saying they had to be better to be accepted. I couldn’t find the exact reference but this refers to it at the bottom of the article.

Comments are currently closed.