Women getting WaPo-ed, update

Week 5 of the WGW watch has just finished. It was a “banner” week. 5.5 of the 34 op-ed articles published in the WaPo since last Tuesday were by women, for a one-week score of 16.5%.
How pathetic is that, if when 16.5% of the discourse in a certain place is contributed by women, we say that that constitutes a “banner” achievement?
At the end of Week 4 of the WGW watch, the cumulative score was 12 pieces out of 129, equals 9.3%. After this week’s “banner” record, the cumulative score is 17.5 out of 163, equals 10.7%.
Woo-hoo! So on a cumulative basis, women now get to contribute a shade over ten percent!
I should note that where I’ve encountered uncertainty– this week a “Robin” someone and a “Pat” someone, neither of whom yielded easily to a Google search that might reveal their gender– I have erred on the side of “giving the benefit of the doubt”, i.e. I counted those two as female.
(The fractional numbers, remember, come from co-authored pieces.)
This past week, in addition, two particularly significant things happned…

Marjorie Williams, a very gifted writer who was taken on by the WaPo as a columnist two or three years ago, died of cancer. She hadn’t been able to write much over the past 18 months. I knew her a little. She was a warm-hearted, extremely talented woman and the mother of two kids. I’m really sorry about her death, and will miss her voice there.
Also, on Saturday, the WaPo editors got one of their number, a female, to write an op-ed piece about the furore that Harvard President Larry Summers raised when he suggested–at a conference on women in science and engineering–that innate differences might make women incapable of practising effectively in scinetific careers.
So guess what, the woman the editors chose to do this, Ruth Marcus, was one of those “queen bee” types of women who, having “made it” professionally on her own (as she thinks), then turns round and heaps scorn on other people who have continuing feminist commitments. (Think Jeane Kirkpatrick.)
In her piece, Marcus wrote about the reaction that Nancy Hopkins, a biology professor at MIT reported having to Summers’ remarks:

“I felt I was going to be sick,” said MIT biology professor Nancy Hopkins, who had led an investigation into hiring practices there. She walked out during Summers’s remarks. “My heart was pounding and my breath was shallow,” she said. “I was extremely upset.”

Marcus’s snide comment on this was:

Was there a feminist around — myself included — who didn’t wince at this bring-out-the-smelling-salts statement?

Well, Ruth Marcus, I’m here to tell you loud and clear that, I totally did not “wince” at Hopkins’s statement. In fact, I thought it was very brave of her to talk so openly about what was evidently a very painful moment in her professional career.
Of course, in general, the phenomenon of the “good-ol’-boy”- dominated media wheeling out some self-serving member of a marginalized group to dump all over other members of that group and the claims they make on the power elite is an old, old story. Think of the stellar “careers” of Ann Coulter or Armstrong Williams (or Clarence Thomas) or whoever… The list is certainly long.
What a pity that Ruth Marcus lent herself to that nasty, dive-and-rule kind of game.
The New York Times, by contrast, did a much better job of addressing the Larry Summer issue on its op-ed page. On Sunday, they had two articles on it. One was by Olivia Judson, a distinguished evolutionary biologist at Imperial College, London who– unlike Ruth Marcus– really knows a lot about what she was writing about. The other, a sort of “counterpoint” to Judson’s, was by Charles Murray, who I think is was a co-author of the problematic book, “The Bell Curve”.
Judson’s conclusion is this:

I think the news is good. We’re not like green spoon worms or elephant seals, with males and females so different that aspiring to an egalitarian society would be ludicrous. And though we may not be jackdaws either – men and women tend to look different, though even here there’s overlap – it’s obvious that where there are intellectual differences, they are so slight they cannot be prejudged.
The interesting questions are, is there an average intrinsic difference? And how extensive is the variation? I would love to know if the averages are the same but the underlying variation is different – with members of one sex tending to be either superb or dreadful at particular sorts of thinking while members of the other are pretty good but rarely exceptional.
Curiously, such a result could arise even if the forces shaping men and women have been identical. In some animals – humans and fruit flies come to mind – males have an X chromosome and a Y chromosome while females have two X’s. In females, then, extreme effects of genes on one X chromosome can be offset by the genes on the other. But in males, there’s no hiding your X. In birds and butterflies, though, it’s the other way around: females have a Z chromosome and a W chromosome, and males snooze along with two Z’s.
The science of sex differences, even in fruit flies and toads, is a ferociously complex subject. It’s also famously fraught, given its malignant history. In fact, there was a time not so long ago when I would have balked at the whole enterprise: the idea there might be intrinsic cognitive differences between men and women was one I found insulting. But science is a great persuader. The jackdaws and spoon worms have forced me to change my mind. Now I’m keen to know what sets men and women apart – and no longer afraid of what we may find.

On the subject of women’s voices on the WaPo op-ed page, which I haven’t written about for a while now, I just want to note that my own arguments for having more strong female voices in important places in the national discourse– including the WaPo op-ed page– come down to three:

(1) While all women are not feminists and some men are, it is still true that the life experiences of women do give them (us) many different things that we bring to the discourse on important matters. For example, my own role in trying to run a household during a war gives me a distinctively different view of war from that held by most of my male colleagues in the media (since they generally have someone else to handle household management for them.) The wisdom that women gain from their life experiences needs to be an integral and valued part of the national discourse…. And yes, I believe that may well strengthen the voice of opposition to gratuitous military “adventures”.
(2) Being part of the national discourse gives a person the ability to help frame issues and persuade voters and policymakers. How can it be justified that at a place like the WaPo (white) males are so disproportionately given this power?
(3) Being an on-staff columnist at a place like the WaPo brings with it all kinds of economic benefits such as I (for example) have never in my career attained. How can it be justified that (white) males are so disproportionately favored with access to these benefits?

These are serious questions about gender equity and the valuing of women’s voices that could and should be asked about the power structures at most of the leading media institutions in the United States.
I’m aiming for 50%. And why not?
Of course, given that men have been hogging the discourse for so darned long, maybe a little temporary “reparation” for women would be in order. Sixty percent for ten years, perhaps?