Okay, readers, so what proportion of the wisdom of the human race do you think resides in the minds of the world’s women?
Fifty percent, perhaps? That might be a pretty good first guess.
How about this: 9.2 percent? That, sadly, is the proportion of women’s contributions to the Washington Post‘s Op-Ed pages over the past 14 days.
I started my “Women getting WaPo-ed” watch on December 21. In the two weeks since then, the once venerable “main” newspaper in the capital of the new global empire has published 65 signed Op-Ed pieces. Just five of those pieces had female authors. A further two pieces, each of them co-authored, were co-signed by a man and a woman: for those I assigned “0.5” as the proportion authored by a woman.
So, we have a total of 6 female authorial units out of 65: that is, 9.2 percent. Had we merely counted the names of all the authors, we’d have had 7 women’s names there out of a total of 67: 10.5 percent.
So there we have the range. Presumably the editor of the WaPo’s Op-Ed page, Fred Hiatt, thinks that somewhere between 9.2 percent and 10.5 percent of the world’s wisdom resides in the minds of women?
Shame!!!
I have to tell you a couple more things, too…
One is that, though I wasn’t counting so closely back then, I’m pretty sure the proportion was quite a lot higher than that back in the late 1980s… Back then, the “guys” who ran the Op-Ed pages of the major newspapers, along with their fellow “guys” who edited the major foreign-affairs mags in the USA, were all fairly concerned about trying to encourage women’s voices and seeking out smart women to write on their pages. Those were, intellectually, much more interesting times. (But I was still trying to raise my kids while also pursuing my career. The “guys” whose careers were really taking off in those days all had wives at home to do that job for them. Which left the guys with plenty of time left over for after-hours schmoozing, brown-nosing, mentor scouting and propitiation, and general career-building… Lucky them!)
But then, after those relatively exciting years had passed, a sort of default, lazy “guy-dom” just set in again in the WaPo and other major institutions of intra-elite discourse. And you see where we’re back to today regarding the presence of women’s voices??
I should note here that I do realize I’m blessed to have my longstanding relationship with the CSM, which I certainly consider to be another institution of intra-elite discourse. But “major”? With what they pay me? You gotta be kidding! It was, however, founded by a woman and has always treated women staff members very seriously.
The other thing I should tell you is that on Christmas Day, the WaPo finally published a truncated version of my original “Letter to the Editor” regarding the nasty, sexist movie review of the week before.
Big thanks to all of you who sent supportive comments, or undertook helpful actions, in response to my earlier post on that issue. Here’s how the letter finally appeared:
- The Post’s Boys Club
I was disgusted by this lead to a movie review in the Dec. 17 Style section: “The experience of ‘House of Flying Daggers’ isn’t like going to a movie so much as going to a truly superb brothel. That is, pleasure is available in every room, in every configuration, in all possibilities, in polymorphic abandon.”
It didn’t take a genius to guess that the writer was a man. I assume the editors who signed off on such a simile must have been men, too. Who would have imagined The Post to be a snickering boys club where the writers fantasize about debasement through prostitution of women and girls (and perhaps young boys as well)?
— Helena Cobban
Charlottesville
Better late than never, and better an edited version than nothing at all… I guess.
Well, now that my data regarding “Women getting WaPo-ed” is building up, I need to decide how to take it to the folks who run the paper there. I mean, maybe they just didn’t know how bad things are…
There should be more gender balance among newspaper columnists but simply leaving things at that is a trap. If WAPO hires women columnists who share the same pro-empire, pro-establishment views of the current people nothing has really changed. What is needed is for critics of U.S. (and especially Israeli) policy to be allowed a voice in the national debate.
Oh, I agree with edq above! We need to hear the voices of the many aspects of American society that are not represented by Republicans and Republican-lites (sometimes known as Democrats). The discussion needs to cover more diverse opinions and more in depth opinions. And we definitely need to hear from women!
I have noticed that WaPo (and all the big newspapers) don’t like to see things too radical~ it has to be pretty mellow for them. And I have written some letters to the NYT (about this war in Iraq) that made them so angry, that I don’t think they will ever publish a letter of mine again!
I blogged on letters to the editor in WaPo earlier today… about what they will and won’t publish. I also posted my letter to WaPo that was published on Christmas Eve day, further down the blog (it was supposed to go on today’s, but I forgot to change the date thingy). I was surprised to see your blog, Helena, on the same newspaper.
my blog is at http://dancewater.blogspot.com
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Does Ann Coulter provide diversity by virtue of her gender? Does attorney General nominee Gonz
“Le combat ou la mort; la lutte sanguinaire ou le neant. C’est ainsi que la question est invinciblement posee.”
George Sand
[From the novel Jean Siska:
“Combat or Death: bloody struggle or extinction. It is thus that the question is inexorably put.”]
I’m thinking that your effort might be more more convincing if you tracked the M-F proportion of letters to the editor in a couple of the WaPo’s rivals for the same period. I’m also wondering whether smaller, regional-market papers might have a better gender balance? The local papers I’m familiar with tend to print almost everything sent their way. I’d guess that around 75% of it is still by men, though.
Congrats,i suppose, on having your remarks published at all, never mind that they were too late to be pertinenent… like how many WaPo readers who read the movie review still remember it? Like justice… to delay is to deny.
I would think, though, that a more revealing indication of bias would be the % of women’s op-ed/letters published compared to the total number of women’s op-ed/ letters submitted for publication.
Helena:
I think Dave’s comment is onto something you should take note of as you collect more data. It would be far more convincing if you collect data from say the NYT and LAT in the US (or your choice of papers) and perhaps comparative data from a couple of British newspapers. A similar approach would buttress your point about the decline in op-eds written by women in 2004 compared to say 1980. The latter observation, if valid, would in my view be another symptom of a prevailing conservative cultural climate. As annoying as it may be to undertake, a comparative statistical approach is more likely to vindicate the point you are trying to make.
good luck, helena. and you’ll need it. when i wrote to the wapo telling them that i was discontinuing my subscription and why, michael getler (the ombudsman) responded that the post, despite its problems, was better than any other paper and that i was probably the only person in the washington post readership area that thinks the way i do. not exactly the kind of attitude that is conducive to change.
talal– Excellent point! I absolutely don’t, however, have the time to do the broad data-collecrtion you envisage. maybe I should ask some help from JWN readers in this…