Via Jane at Firedoglake, a comment from Garance Franke-Ruta about the dearth of women opinion writers in progressive publications.
O]nce Amy Sullivan leaves the Washington Monthly toward the end of the month, I will have the peculiar honor of being the only female more than half-time political writer left at any of the liberal magazines in Washington. (Michelle Cottle at TNR being the other one, and part-time.) Sigh.
No women staff writers but me and Michelle in Washington at: TNR, TAP, WaMo, MoJo, The Nation, or Salon.
Plenty of women in middle-management, though.
The problem of women being shut out of opinion media, even progressive opinion media, is related to the one you describe of women not voting. Anna Greenberg has done research into this and discovered that a major reason these women don’t vote is they feel like they’re not well-informed and therefore aren’t qualified to vote. One reason they probably don’t feel well-informed is that they don’t keep up with political media as much as men, and I’d wager that one reason they don’t do that is when they turn to it they don’t see anyone who looks like they do or is talking about their concerns in a way they can relate to.
Mind you, I’m not terribly upset at losing Amy Sullivan as an opinion person, given how crappy some of her columns on religion and the Democrats are. But I am upset at losing another female voice from a progressive mediasphere that relies too heavily on white males already. And not just white males, white males from Ivy League universities. There may not be active, conscious misogyny and racism going on, just an unexamined clubbiness, but if the progressive opinion universe is serious about promoting voting among populations that aren’t voting, they might want to do a little self-examination. As I said in comments to the superhero post, if we exempt fanboys from criticism of their privilege because they’re friends and (often) allies, it’s a short step from there to exempting liberal and progressive guys despite stuff like the Kos pie fight.
I had a subscription to The Nation back in the mid 90′s. For a while, I thought they were great. They seemed to have a take on issues that was far more to the left of many other publications. It was nice to read a publication that wasn’t wishy-washy in saying what needed to be said.
After a few years of reading The Nation, the shiny novelty of its lefty approach wore off. Their articles were still great, but something was missing. I noticed that there was a dearth of articles on women’s issues and–much to my anger and dismay–the number of women writing for the publication were few in number. I began to pay more attention to the bylines and became angrier with each new issue as the omission became glaringly obvious.
It became increasingly difficult to read a publication which excluded women’s voices. In a fit of disgust and frustration, I cancelled my subscription. I’m sad but not surprised to hear that they still don’t get it.
Thank goodness for the internet. The number of feminist blogs seem to be increasing exponentially these last few years. Thank you for all your hard work, Feministe! You are one of the first feminist blogs I found during my travels in virtual space.
As someone who is very disconnected with the “progressive mediasphere” I’m having trouble discerning the difference between staff writers and regular columnists and why that’s significant. Katha Pollitt is a frequent columnist at the Nation I believe, but apparently not a staff writer. Are there lists of the latter to be found?
Eh, also the Weekly Standard website has prominent pictures of its writers next to every article. Is this part of the way the Right tries to promote its writers into celebrity status? When you look at all the people in the punditocracy, including not a few women, who have made media careers in the right wing noise machine, it’s obvious they’re doing something very different, though I’m not sure the Left would want to copy that.
As to where the wimmin at? My hypothesis: blogging. :D
I never understood, as a woman, why women complain about the need to see one another in a powerful positions they might one day want to attain, especially now. Being brought up by my parents by the motto, “If you work hard enough you can achieve anything” The cycle of blaming “not enough” role models is silly. If you want something you work for it, not blame it on the lack of women in the media. The fact that I see more men on tv does not dissuade me from watching them. In fact, I deplore when people use this argument, if men and women are equally why should it matter that the anchor is a man or a woman? Girls for (at least) last twenty years have grown up in a culture that says girls are just as good as boys. So, blaming the fact that women don’t follow politics on men is ridiculous. Here’s a thought many women are not that interested in politics. They see other ways of changing the life around them. Also politics is quite an aggressive arena, the majority of women tend to avoid (on average) aggressive situations much more than men. (I’m not saying there aren’t plenty of tough minded and aggressive women.)
So to reiterate, when I look at a person I don’t immediately think: gender, skin color, ethnic background, I first and foremost pay attention to the content, what they say and write is more important.
I think more so than ‘women follow politics less than men, and thus feel uninformed’ is that women, as has been mentioned a million times on this site and other feminist blogs, are less likely to be confident in their own competence. In my experience, my female friends are more likely to tell my they don’t feel well-informed enough to have an opinion and male friends are more likely to say ‘here’s the opinion I have based on my limited knowledge,’ even though my female friends tend to have about the same grasp on the issues (which is better than they think it is) as the men.
Yes, but seeing more women on TV, does, in fact, dissuade men from watching. That doesn’t bother you?
Except that the reality doesn’t match the message. If that’s really the case, where are the female TV anchors and political writers? The partners in law firms, the heads of government agencies? Rhetoric about equality and equality are not equivalent.
I have every intention of being a judge, but there are not a lot female role models. 2 women total serving on the Supreme Court doesn’t make me think I don’t want to aspire to that level. But it makes a hell of a lot harder to find people that I feel I can relate to. White men enjoy privilege that I never will.
Why can you only relate to someone based on their skin color and gender? And not their ideas? There are plenty of women news anchors on my local news channels. Also, CNN and Fox have quite a lot of women, but I guess these women don’t count because they are not liberal or “progressive” enough.(Not to mention that the Nation, for example, has a female editor – Katrina vanden Heuvel.)
Why are white men so much worse than say black women? Do all white men enjoy privilege, what about a high school drop out white guy? Is he more privileged than college educated Hispanic guy? Not all white men are elite undeserving pricks and not all black women are underprivileged do gooders. I’ve known qute a few white guys who have been passed over a job because the employer needs to hire a minority or women for the job. Is that also white privilege you talk about?
Again my point is that I don’t need another women to feel solidarity with someone. Look there’s sexism and racism in America, I’m not arguing there isn’t. But I don’t see going to the “I don’t see enough of (fill in gender/race) and that makes feel like I can’t relate to who they are” card to explain why women are this or that. I don’t want to play the game of a victim.The reason why women are not making partner in a law firms or getting the CEO positions is much more complicated than shouting sexism and white man privileges.
I guess your point about men not wanting to watch women on tv is troubling but where do you get this assertion? It’s strange then that Katie Couric was hired for such a prominent position if that is true.
I’m not saying you *only* relate based on demographics, but the more someone is like you, the easier it is to relate, and that includes race/gender, etc. and ideology.
Yes. It operates in different ways at different times (and to different degrees), but it’s always there.
No one’s arguing that racism and sexism are the sole causes of the disparity, merely that they’re relevant. If you read Zuzu’s post, she says specifically “There may not be active, conscious misogyny and racism going on, just an unexamined clubbiness, but if the progressive opinion universe is serious about promoting voting among populations that aren’t voting, they might want to do a little self-examination.” That’s hardly playing the victim.
And people repeatedly questioned as to whether or not she was fit for the position, whether she could project substantial gravitas, etc. And here’s a short post about representation of women in the media
It’s not that you need to get into the game of “victim.” But there has to be a point where we stand up and say that there’s something wrong with a progressive publication that purports to espouse ideas of diversity and equality that nonetheless presents an all-male, all-white, all-Ivy-League-educated point of view in their political and opinion writing.
There are issues that those white, well-educated men just do not see because they have never had to. So even if they’re well-intentioned, their pieces miss out on issues important to other types of people because they don’t know that they’re issues in the first place. It reinforces the idea that the white male is the default, and in particular the white, well-educated male.
I take your point Zuzu that there is something wrong with a publication that espouses equality ideals and then doesn’t practice it. Academics do it all the time as well. I took the post a criticism of all media forums, not only the Nation. And of course I agree that there are certain issues that women can discuss better (with more insight than men and vice-versa).
i want to second bryna’s comment. i once had a seemingly-arrogant boyfriend, and while trying to figure out exactly why he annoyed me, i noticed the difference in the way we carried on conversations with other people. he and i would read the same article, and later, when the topic came up in conversation, he would just lay out the facts, while i would say, “i read in ‘the nation’ the other day that…”
once he read the material, he owned it. i often felt like it wasn’t my own knowledge, and i tried to attribute it to the person who wrote the article. i noticed a few times that he would confidently explain something to me, from an article that i had already read and then shown him. reading an article about something turned him into an expert on the subject, whereas it turned me into… someone who read an article. he would have no problem proclaiming opinions on things he knew relatively little about. i’d have to research it extensively before i made any public comment. (i still don’t know which of these approaches is better, but i’m sure one is more useful for op-ed columns.) i’ve noticed these gender roles with other friends, too.
Actually, it is easy to continually underestimate the totality of inequalities in human society:
(I think one of the important points here is to acknowledge the possibility that the origins of people’s preferences may be relevant. That is, tastes are shaped not only by individual idosyncracy but also socially structured experience.)
For example, it is a known that compared to women, men are more knowledgeable and more interested in politics and more likely to feel politically efficacious. This is not to say that men are not more likely to claim credit; the two differences can exist side by side. Differences in political engagement between men and women have been observed across democratic societies, especially ones where the dominant religion is Catholicism. These differences have been explained in different ways, including differences in resources, gender-based social roles, and gender consciousness of women.
Some surveys have shown differing levels of ability to identify political leaders by gender; for example, one survey from the 1980s found that men were more likely to be able to name a slate of world leaders, with the exception of Margaret Thatcher; or that Canadian men were more likely to be able to identify Prime Ministers, with the exception of Kim Campbell. But I’m not sure it’s been systematically shown that there is any sort of role-modelling effect.