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!

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.