Richard Jeffrey Newman

…and the results are not much dif­fer­ent from last year. Women are still pro­foundly under rep­re­sented in lit­er­ary mag­a­zine pub­lish­ing. This is not sur­pris­ing, since as Erin Belieu writes:

[W]e know that sig­nif­i­cant cul­tural change takes time.

We also know that this is a con­ver­sa­tion that’s not going away; when we talk to other writ­ers, when we talk to our writ­ing students, we know things are in the process of chang­ing for the better, that our lit­er­ary culture’s con­scious­ness has been raised. And we believe we’ve begun to see hope­ful signs. Yes, many lit­er­ary out­lets still pro­duced their phal­lo­cen­tric Best Books list this year. But notice how care­ful most of them were to cre­ate some con­text for their lists’ inher­ent sub­jec­tiv­ity.  The word “Best” now has a per­ma­nent aster­isk next to it, no mat­ter where you line up in our writ­ing community’s gen­der debate. And to acknowl­edge your bias is one step toward open­ing your mind. We’ve come a long way since Pub­lish­ers’ Weekly breezily dis­missed the total absence of women in their top ten list of 2009.

I wrote about why the count mat­ters to me per­son­ally in this post, and I am happy and hum­bled (really) that Vida pub­lished a cou­ple of quotes from it with their charts.

Tagged sexism