Feminism, journalism and practicing what we preach
How good are organisations that are committed to gender equality at getting their own house in order? Left-wing organisations, without exception, formally accept the basic ideas of gender equality and often go far further in their rhetoric. They have a long history of talking the talk on gender but are they walking the walk?
Inspired by the Atheists’ Guide to Christmas which advertises six of its contributors, all men, on the jacket I decided it was time to do a little light empirical research. Incidentally, readers may be pleased to hear that women are allowed to be atheists as, of 46 contributors, the editors did make room for 13 women, even if none of their names made it onto the front cover.
In the spirit of the Electoral Reform Society’s ‘Counting Women In‘ campaign that is highlighting the fact that there are four times as many male MPs as female, as well as the excellent F-Word pieces on gender representation in comedy I thought I’d join in with a quick and dirty analysis of the UK’s left press.
It doesn’t look too good I’m afraid.
As we can see from the snapshot (below) in nine left-leaning print publications that produce 243 articles only 73 were written by women. In other words more than twice as many pieces were written by men as women.
It’s interesting that the ‘worst’ half of the table includes the explicitly Marxist papers and the Labour Party affiliates who are often keen to promote gender quotas in various elections. Perhaps it’s time to introduce some quotas in their publications?
Perhaps it’s unfair to pick on Tribune, who are reportedly struggling to stay afloat, but there may be a connection between having more than seven times as many pieces written by men than women and struggling to find a paying audience.
Of the ‘better’ half special mention must go to the New Internationalist who were alone in having more pieces by women than men. Interestingly all four come from a more pluralist, less traditional leftism. Pacifism in the case of Peace News, the Green Party in the case of the in-house magazine Green World and the explicitly pluralist left for the New Internationalist and Red Pepper.
Mind you, before we start back slapping and giving out cigars, it comes to something when having twice as many pieces by men than women puts you with the angels. What’s clear is that the left in general needs to up its game and the more traditional sectors of the left doubly so.
This isn’t necessarily about taking women’s issues seriously but more about taking women themselves seriously, no matter which subject they are writing about. Without a real space for women’s voices when dealing with the red meat of politics rather than just ‘women’s issues’ then the left is falling far short of its formal aspirations for gender equality.
A note on methodology
The table represents how many articles were written by male and female authors and in a few cases where articles had identifiable authors of both sexes. I’ve left out entirely all articles and editorials that have no attribution. The ratio column refers to the number of men to women – ie if the ratio is 2 that means that for every female author there are two male authors.
I’ve left out the (even more) obscure publications sticking to print publications from the progressive left. I’ve deliberately not included explicitly feminist or women’s press as if they don’t get women to write for them the mind boggles. In both cases this was to avoid distorting the figures.
In each case I’ve taken a single issue of each publication. To be truly comprehensive you would really need to take a year or more of back issues – but my life’s a little too short to get quite that obsessive!
On that note I’ve also gone for the number of articles written by men or women. Alternative approaches could have been to count the number of authors (a number of publications had single writers who produced a numerous articles) or by column inches / pages. The latter would have quite a significant impact because some of these publications do seem to favour women reviewers (a third of a page each) and male article writers (one, two or more pages per piece). Again, that ups the work load a touch too far for me.
My aim was to get a useful impression of where we are and I hope this snapshot does just that. I’m sure this method could be extended to other kinds of publication or over a longer time period. Feel free to your counting hats on!
hi!,I love your writing very a lot! proportion we keep in touch extra approximately your article on AOL?
I need an expert on this house to solve my problem. May be that is
you! Taking a look forward to look you.
This piece of writing will help the internet people for building up new web site or even a weblog from start to end.
Feel free to surf tto my web-site overcoming social anxiety
Hello i am kavin, its my first occasion to commenting anywhere, whern i
redad this piece of writing i thought i could alo make comment due
to this brilliant post.
My web-site thrush in babies
I think a to do list is emerging for the bright green crew.
i) ask, say, half a dozen women this week for articles this week. (Scottish Green Party conference reports could be one angle)
ii) scout out some other blogs and think about reposting (although I know you wont want to do that too often) to get the ball rolling.
iii) women BG readers – if you feel you’ve got something to say – why not pitch it? They’ve already said they want to hear from you and they are a friendly bunch.
My added homework is that when you repost or commision pieces from women – don’t make them posts on women’s issues or feminism – women’s voices deserve to be heard on every subject not just in selected spaces.
What do you think?
Plenty of articles on BG and similar blogs come with a little ‘originally posted on (x) blog/publication’ tag at the top…
I have to admit I’m not a particularly broad follower of the feminist blogosphere, but if there are indeed women writing on a variety of political topics within it, couldn’t BG editors just ask to reproduce them here, when they come across some they particularly like? (Perhaps with a proactive effort to start doing so, if editors are particularly worried about increasing the visibility of female authors on the blog?)
Women needing to be asked to write has a parallel – women needing to be asked to stand for political office and posts. There’s a lesson in there for lots of structures.
Adam – Commissioning more pieces from women would probably be a good step. Asking to write for somebody else’s blog is kind of intimidating anyway, and a lot of women are socialised to not put themselves forward, so some people might find it easier if they were asked.
It might also be an idea to think about what you would do if you got a particularly abusive or threatening troll on the site.
You could throw in New Left Review (no females on the latest cover) and the London Review of Books (3 out of 15 contributors to latest edition).
Perhaps leftish feminist women are too sensible to work for fringe publications and are all employed in mainstream media?
Alyson – thanks.
With regards to Bright Green, yes. For me, the problem is ours – ie there are lots of women writing great pieces on a range of subjects in other places, mainly for female audiences. They don’t particularly need us to give them the small platform we have here in order to get themselves heard.
But that doesn’t mean we don’t need/want them them.
It’s also useful to get your perspective on submitting things. One of the most stark things I have noticed since we started running BG has been the proportion of blog submissions we get from men vs the proportion we get from women – ie, many, many more from men. However, when we ask women to write things on specific subjects, they are just as likely to say yes. (or so it seems to me – I’ve not done a study or anything).
So maybe we need to do more commissioning if we want more female writers…
Anyway, just a thought,
Adam
I guess it was inevitable that the discussion would turn to blogs, and this blog in particular, and that’s fair enough.
Before we go there though I want to highlight that the post is about print publications (which inevitably need finances and distribution models in a way blogs do not) and are much less of a self-publish model.
I certainly don’t discount the feminist blog-o-sphere which is vast – but as i mention in the note on methodology above – if I’d included publications like MsLexia et al in the figures it would have helped conceal the problem not expose it.
I do think blogs and print have different issues. For instance i don’t think the reason that socialist worker have a lot less industrial reports from women than men is that those women are writing for feminist magazines instead – even if this can happen online.
As a woman who contributes to this blog, I feel like I should offer some response. First of all, to say that having your writing up on a blog is not as scary as it seems. Women are taught to be afraid of a lot of things and that makes it difficult to put yourself forward for something like this. When I first wrote something purposefully for Bright Green, I was terrified by the idea that I was about to have something overtly political published under my own name – which if you’re a woman, can attract threats of rape or murder. Fortunately that hasn’t happened to me (yet), so the fear is greatly diminished, but it will never go away entirely.
This is why so many women who do blog do so within the feminist movement, rather than in the wider left. When your audience is mainly female, the risks seem smaller. This is essential because it means that many women who write in the feminist blogosphere wouldn’t write at all if that space wasn’t available to them, but it also means that women writers gravitate towards it. The presence of other women can be very reassuring, and makes the threat of misogyny easier to deal with. This skews the gender balance even further on general (as opposed to specifically feminist) left-wing blogs, but is this necessarily a problem? It’s not difficult to find women’s writing on the internet; it’s just that it often isn’t in the same places as men’s writing, or deals with different issues. If you want to read the work of female writers, you might just have to go to them instead of expecting them to come to you. To discount their work because it is created (mostly) by and for women is kind of arrogant.
Kieran,
Yes, I was in fact just logging on to say the same thing – we published the piece in full knowledge that we must do better. However, I think it is important to be careful not to allow any blame for this to fall on women. We may not actively discriminate in that we aren’t more likely to reject pieces from women, but that doesn’t mean we don’t accidentally create or at least contribute to an environment in which women are less likely to contribute…
Anyway, any thoughts on that appreciated.
Adam
It is an interesting point, but I notice that BrightGreenScotland.org has only one female author out of ten articles on the front page. I am sure this is a lack of contributions rather than any editorial bias but it raises the question as to how to get more women writing these types of articles?