[Do you remember this? It was a real thing we did. It still fills me with pride whenever I remember it. —MB]
It’s the shameful open secret of our industry: Journalism is kind of a boys’ club. Since 2009, VIDA: Women in Literary Arts has tracked the gender breakdown of bylines in major publications as well as lesser known literary outlets, and what they’ve found is damning: Very few of the surveyed publications are hitting a 50-50 split when it comes to the gender breakdown of their bylines. In VIDA’s most recent count from 2015, only about 30 percent of the Nation’s bylines belonged to women. At the New Yorker, it was about 34 percent. Harper’s and the New Republic barely broke 40 percent. Unsurprisingly, the numbers are even worse when it comes to racial diversity and sexual identity.
This is happening at some of the country’s most well known national print media outlets, so you know it’s also happening at those with fewer resources to recruit and compensate writers. That’s a problem if you care about gender equality, but it’s also a problem if you care about good journalism, because if a publication isn’t staffed with a variety of voices, its reporting and criticism will be weaker, less comprehensive, and less nuanced. It will have blind spots. In a precarious, politically corrupt era when quality journalism is needed more urgently than ever, this is something we can’t afford to perpetuate.
So we’re doing something about it, in solidarity with those taking part in A Day Without a Woman, the women whose invisible labor powers our country, and the women who power our newspaper.