Yesterday I discussed some of the ways in which women are discounted in Australia. For example, women are paid 83% of what men are paid, and women have a minimal presence in the forums of power and influence.
One such forum is the opinion-forming publication, The Monthly. This is a magazine with an audience that would also read, say, The Atlantic Monthly or The New Yorker.
I analysed the gender of authors featured in 11 issues of The Monthly and found that 73% of articles were written by a male author, 27% by a female author.
Following on from that post, my trusty North American correspondent, Phil, has analysed 5 issues of The Atlantic Monthly and 5 issues of The New Yorker. Eerily, the gender breakdown for The Atlantic Monthly is exactly the same as for The Monthly: 73% and 27%. And The New Yorker is very similar.
Here are the charts:
And here is the issue-by-issue breakdown for The Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker (blue-shaded figures=male authors, yellow-shaded figures=female authors).
It does not comfort me one whit that Australia may be as good as it gets.
*****
My sincere thanks to Phil for assembling the figures and sending them to me so promptly. SGxx
I looked at the last 3 printed issues of your own beloved London Review of Books. Of the total 47 articles, 5 are by women, which equals 11%.
In the last 3 printed issues of the New York Review of Books, articles by women accounted for 8 of the 59 articles, which equals 13%.
However, it could be that the readers of all of these publications are heavily men. In which case the gender breakdown percentage of those who write for these publications makes sense.
Yes, though I’m not so interested in the “reasons” for this absence of female thinkers/writers. I can always think up a hundred reasons why something is one way or another. My interest is not “why”; my interest is what’s so: ie, in these opinion-forming publications, women are a minor presence.
I like this exercise. I will look into our internal authors’ list at The Economist and do a count….
Great ! SGx
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Shocking isn’t it. I feel we are going backwards from the 80′s in some way, after the feminist boom. It would be interesting to look at the writing distribution on the 70-80′s continum/era.
Mmm … great idea. I might look and see if any of these publications have online archives that go back that far. Thanks. SGx