Amy Mercer at The Writer Mama calls attention today to an article from Bitch Magazine that calls for women to own their ambition for their writing careers, to stop apologizing for their writing or for being writers, and to stop accepting dismissive excuses for being overlooked. The author of the article, Anna Clark, cites an example of such shoulder-shrugging close to home:
Whether they write novels or cover stories or op-eds, even the most talented women writers often aren’t validated in the same way that their male counterparts are. While there are few Neanderthals who would publicly say that the byline gap in literary journals and periodicals is due to the fact that women can’t write as well as men, the usual justifications include shrugging dismissals like, “We don’t get enough quality submissions by women.” When I pointed out the 5:29 byline ratio of the fall 2006 issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review on my website, for instance, the journal’s editor, Ted Genoways, commented on the post that, “Unfortunately, the disparity in our issues is, I think, more reflective of a symptom than a root cause; there simply seem to be fewer women who are freelance journalists, travel writers, and political pundits—three areas that now largely compose our editorial content. As a result, the good ones are in high demand and often out of our price range.”
Perhaps this is not the best example Clark could have used. I think Genoways’ response falls short of being dismissive. He’s not excusing himself by saying that he’s failing to find quality female contributors, he’s saying he can’t afford them, and that does speak to a possible problem with the available pool of talent. It’s a chicken-and-egg problem to some extent (why go into freelance journalism if no one like you ever gets published?) but chicken-egg problems tend to be systemic, not the kind you can pin on one particular editor.
What I find more egregious is the ongoing trend of relegating women to the soft stories in the back of magazines like The Atlantic or the Washington Post Sunday Magazine, or to “XX” sections of websites. I could not be more weary of reading articles about how challenging it is to find just the right shoes for a party or how difficult it is to find good domestic help. One more story about best friends who almost lose their friendship over a misunderstanding but then bring it back from the brink over skim lattes will send me over the brink. I’d rather read a measly five meaty articles in VQR than 500 more personal essays about purses or menopause or mammograms. And I much prefer a magazine like VQR that markets itself to the general reader to one that feels it has to set aside a few pages for the ladies.
But other than that small point, the Bitch article is great — go read it.
Filed under: authors, charlottesville, freelancing, magazines, markets, media, publishing, reading, virginia, writing | Tagged: Bitch Magazine, freelancing, gender equity, Virginia Quarterly Review, VQR
Yeh, you can see Ted’s response—he definitely wasn’t dismissive. It’s a topic that comes up in our office routinely. We keep the sexual balance in mind for every issue. The trouble is that, short of accepting stories that are less good than other options before us, there’s just not much that we can do w/r/t our submission queue.
Over half of our readers are female, and that’s actually a decline from last school year, when 3/4 were female. For fiction or nonfiction to be published, it’s got to meet the approval of one of the respective women who stand between the first line readers and our editor. Now, it’s altogether possible that some women are biased against female authors, but there’s only so much we can do.
Unfortunately, I can’t run any queries on our database to see where women fall off in the percentages, because we don’t ask people for their sex. (I could infer it from names, but that would first require manually classifying thousands of authors, which isn’t gonna happen.
But I’d like to know, for instance, what percentage of our submissions come from women. And what percentage of those submissions are declined by the slush pile readers. And whether that rate is different among slush pile readers who choose to read blind (as we give them the option to do) than those who don’t. And what percentage of those recommended for acceptance pass muster with the genre editors. And what percentage Ted declines. And then, of course, how all of those compare with men. I’d love to do that—I think it could be revealing—but unfortunately, it’s just not possible.
Thanks for the response, Waldo. Even with all that data, we wouldn’t know if women were failing to submit material to VQR with the expectation that they would be rejected anyway — in the same way that any underrepresented group might not bother to apply for positions they think they’re unlikely to get. One question is, Is VQR *soliciting* freelance articles from women authors?
And why not require editors all the way up the line to read blind?
FWIW, I just used the Social Security Administration’s baby name data for the past few decades to determine that 40% of our submitting authors are female. That’s going back to September 2006, or just over two years of data. (And a little over 7,000 authors.)
Even with all that data, we wouldn’t know if women were failing to submit material to VQR with the expectation that they would be rejected anyway — in the same way that any underrepresented group might not bother to apply for positions they think they’re unlikely to get.
Well, it might be useful historically. VQR was one of the first major literary magazines to be edited by a woman. Charlotte Kohler edited VQR for decades, longer than any other editors of the publication. Did we publish more women, or less, under her? I’d like to know.
Is VQR *soliciting* freelance articles from women authors?
I couldn’t tell you. Ted is on leave, writing a book, as he has been for the past month, and will be for the next month. We just don’t solicit a lot of articles. With our current issue, I think Laura Browder & Sascha Pflaeging (writer and photographer of one of our features) approached us. Half of the poetry in this issue is by female writers, and I think all of that was unsolicited. Sydney Blair’s book review was solicited. Mara Hvistendahl’s article about China’s gender imbalance was not.
The trouble with soliciting writing is that it provides an inherent implication that it’ll be published. On the whole, that’s something we’d rather avoid, because that involves a lot of hand-holding, kill fees, and an overall investment of time and money that isn’t necessary for unsolicited work.
And why not require editors all the way up the line to read blind?
Many of our readers simply don’t want to read blind, and choose not to do so. My background is in programming, not magazine publishing, so reading blind seems like a no-brainer to me. But very, very few publications do so, and I’ve been given a great many reasons of why that’s so. All of those reasons sound nice, and seem to be gospel among lit mag types.
I should mention a flaw in my logic throughout this, and that’s the presumption that women are more likely to publish writing by women. There’s actually no reason to think that. The trouble is that there’s really very little else of consequence within our control. If having a magazine edited for much of its existence by a women, having women act as the primary genre editors, and having women make up the bulk of the readers are insufficient to result in more writing by women being published, there’s not much more that we can do within that editorial pipeline to affect that outcome. But, like I said, I’m a programmer, not a writer.
Whenever this topic comes up, Ted always implores people for advice about how lit mags could operate differently to result in more women being published. If he’s ever gotten any substantive advice as a result of those pleas, that’s news to me. Consider it a standing request!