Screenshot of the 2013 VIDA count, released yesterday (via vidaweb.org)
If you are a woman writer who uses the internet, there’s a good chance you spent at least some portion of yesterday looking at (or bookmarking for later) the new VIDA count. For those unfamiliar with it, the VIDA count is an annual tally of the gender gap at literary publications. The admirable women behind VIDA compile the numbers of female vs. male bylines, female vs. male book reviewers, and female vs. male authors reviewed at such big-name publications as The Atlantic, The Nation, the New York Review of Books, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and n+1, as well as smaller journals like A Public Space, Fence, and The Missouri Review, and then format the results in pie charts. The numbers, this year as ever (VIDA has been counting in some form since 2009), are depressing.
Take, for instance, the New York Review of Books. In 2013 (the 2014 VIDA count reflects the previous year), 212 of the publication’s book reviewers were men, and only 52 women. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, 307 male authors received reviews in NYRB, as compared with 80 female authors. One hundred seventeen of the publication’s bylines went to men, 32 to women.
And no, the NYRB is not unique: its abysmal gender disproportion is rivaled by that of the London Review of Books (195 male book reviewers, 43 female), The New Republic (235 male bylines, 81 female), the Times Literary Supplement (907 men reviewed, 313 women), The New Yorker (555 male writers overall, 253 female), and Harper’s (82 male bylines, 25 female). No matter how you slice these pies, they are appalling.
I suppose I should point out that there has been some progress. Both The Paris Review and the New York Times Book Review have made notable efforts to improve their gender equality. Tin House continues to favor women. Still, if you’re a female writer, the VIDA count is a bleak read. It leaves me somewhere between drifting hopelessness and furious motivation.
Women and Information Technology, By the Numbers (via Women’s Media Center) (click to enlarge)
And that was before I paged through the “Status of Women in the US Media in 2014” report, which the Women’s Media Center published last week. The “Status of Women” report takes a much broader view than the VIDA count, compiling findings from various organizations to zoom out from literary publications to the media landscape in general: newspapers, radio, TV, film, tech, video games. Unfortunately, the results aren’t any rosier. A sample: the percentage of women in the newsroom has stayed static, around 36%, for the last 15 years; of 143 major newspaper opinion columnists, 38 are women; the 16 biggest paychecks earned by actors for a single film in 2013 all went to men; in the top 100 films of 2012, women had only 28.4% of the roles with speaking parts; in 2012, roughly half (47%) of all gamers were women, but they made up only 12% of game developers; 89% of tech start-ups are launched by all-male teams; of the 20 most-visited online news sites, women own zero.
Importantly, the “Status of Women” report brings race and ethnicity into the discussion. A number of women have rightly called out VIDA for not including these factors in its counts, part of a larger critique of mainstream feminism from feminists of color. Among those is writer Roxane Gay, who, in the past two years, conducted her own VIDA-style tallies focused on racial disparities at literary publications. (The numbers were dismal.) The “Status of Women” report is far from comprehensive or perfect, but compared with VIDA, it feels more nuanced and complicated (and therefore more realistic), telling us that 89.1% of the 2013 radio news workforce was white; that 67% of the guests on Melissa Harris-Perry’s show in 2013 were not white, versus 16% of non-white guests on all of the Sunday news round-ups on ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC combined; that sports writers are 90% male and 90% white; that in movies in 2012, 41.1% of Latinas characters were “provocatively attired” and 39.3% partly naked.
2012–13 TV episodic director diversity over three years (via Women’s Media Center)
It’s hard to know what to do with all of this information, besides drown in it. Depressing statistics are doled out one after the other, in eye-catching infographics and charts to help lessen the blow. What is there left to learn, besides what so many of us already know (and others choose to ignore)? People write blog posts with takeaway messages and defenses of the count, but those people are always women, and those things have already been written. In the face of such thoroughly documented discrimination, the facts seem to render the commentary superfluous.
Types of jobs sought by journalism and mass communication bachelor’s degree recipients 2012 (via Women’s Media Center)
I will say that all of this has gotten me thinking about art. We have our own watchdogs — the Guerrilla Girls, you might say, are a more artful VIDA, and then there’s the ritual of the Whitney Biennial count, which I’ve taken part in myself. But the art world reminds me of the publishing and literary worlds, in a certain way: when you look around, you see lots of women, so it seems safe to assume that things are OK. It’s only when you stop to count — museum directors, board members, auction prices — that the facade crumbles away. When it comes to racism, well, we’re not as good as hiding that. The fact that Carrie Mae Weems is the first African-American woman to have a retrospective at the Guggenheim — only now, 75 years after the museum’s founding — is shocking. Change at a certain level looks both painful and profound.
Art writing has received far less scrutiny than art institutions. I haven’t done a formal count (yet), but I’m inclined to think that, gender-wise, we’re in decent shape; female bylines seem to abound. Then again, it may be that mirage, and when you begin to parse the regular reviewers, for whom criticism is a job, from the freelancers and side writers, things get more complicated, quite possibly more uneven. (A heavy overlap with academia also makes art writing difficult to analyze on its own.) On the subject of race, there’s no question, though: art writing is unacceptably white.
I realize I’m only touching the tip of the conversation here. There’s much more to be said, thought, and done, including identifying potential causes and brainstorming potential solutions. In the meantime, as we go, keep reading and keep counting.
Jillian, thanks for shining a light on this stats. I saw the article on Slate yesterday and also got angry. I fear that most emerging women writers take a real hit from the pay gap.
In 2012, the official number was that women earn $0.77 for every $1.00 a man earns. And it puts emerging freelancing women writers with b-jobs at a disadvantage vs. men who can earn more at their B jobs and use those funds to invest in their career whether it’s workshops, networking at events with paid tickets, taking out a key connection out for drinks/coffee/dinner that you pay for, and the various other “pay-to-play” schemes it takes to get ahead professionally in the arts and letters, and eventually land one of those full time writer jobs that mostly go to men. The editors think these men earned it. But the truth is murkier.
To get historical, in the 1980s, it was worse. Women were only earning an average of $.60 for every $1.00 men earned. And that sexism put up real hurdles for many women who are now in the prime of their creativity and told they don’t have “the right experiences” in their past to justify editorial investment. Many of them simply couldn’t afford to do what men writers could do to get ahead.
Philanthropists need to take the women’s pay gap more seriously – both the 77% today and the dark legacy of the 60% in the 80s. Foundations need to offer more financial support to women writers at every stage. For young women, mentoring programs like Girls Write Now should be replicated nationally. For adults, philanthropists needs to establish more grants for women writers and give more $$ away. It’s not sexist to address a fundamental and documented discrepancy in the american economy – that women earn less than men – and it has nothing to do with competence.
Editors in 2014 need to take special care in how they evaluate new writers to “take on.” They are many talented women with incredible things to say.
This is an excellent document about the pay gap – http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/GenderGap.html
I wonder how much time J.K. Rowling spends looking at the VIDA count. “For the artist, the thing is not dreaming, or talking, but work.” –Rodin
I wonder why J.K. Rowling chose to write under the initials “J.K.” rather than use her full, female-sounding name.
Probably a big fan of J.R. Tolkien, and C.S. Lewis.
She told Oprah her publisher told her to do that because they didn’t think young boys would want to read a book written by a woman. Citation on her wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._K._Rowling
The Wikipedia source you cited says her publishers “asked” her to use her initials after her first novel. As an independent woman, strong enough to maintain creative control of the Potter movies, I think she is strong enough to decide for herself how she markets her books to teenage boys. Do you really think the Potter books would have been less of a success if they were written by a Joanna Rowling?
The point of my initial post is that successful people probably don’t spend a lot of time worrying about fluffing their victim status, but are out there doing the work they need to do to be successful.
I think first-time authors are easily intimidated, particularly when you go against your publisher. I think this is the type of system that impacts people, and yes, I actually do think it would’ve impacted readership. I think subconscious all these factors impact people.
The fact of the books being written about Joanna Rowling would DEFINITELY have impacted their popularity and readership. To suggest that it wouldn’t is, at best, naive. On top of which, your insinuation that one can either: a) spend time ‘being a victim’ or b) be successful is an absurdly false duality, not least because successful people (and all people) worry about their success, which means they do both things simultaneously. But no, you’re right, a means of researching and reporting on the gender gap and sexism is merely just “fluffing” one’s “victim status,” as us petty and pesky women do.
So how does keeping track of categories of writers, rather than writing, help the writer? And doesn’t it seem counter to the human spirit to be focused on people as mere categories? Nor do I see anything in spit polishing a victimhood status creating anything leading to success, (in any area of life), but to each his/her own.
Not sure how reporting facts about underrepresentation has anything to do with victimhood. Perhaps we disagree on that front.
How about the representation of good writers vs not as good writers? If the question is some inherent sexism, the problem can be solved by sending in submissions nom de plume. Not sure how reporting facts about underrepresentation has anything to do with helping a writer get published. No perhaps about it, we do disagree, but it’s a small thing…have a great day/evening. Thanks for the replies.
it’s not a nice picture, very true, and work needs to be done. note though this quote from the VIDA page: “So this year, we look to small press publishers for the movers and shakers in our new secondary VIDA Count, the Larger Literary Landscape. Overall, we’re seeing a very different snapshot of writers writing. It is a healthier, more robust abundance of voices.”
it seems clear to me that this is due, probably in larger part, to women holding more editorial reigns in the small press world but also, in part, to the men in that world being a bit more aware of the problem.