Crude . . . It's a Compliment

Ralfi let his breath out explosively and began to laugh, exposing teeth that hadn't been kept up to the Chriatian White standard. The she turned the disruptor off.
"Two million," I said.
"My kind of man," she said, and laughed. "What's in the bag?"
"A shotgun."
"Crude." It might have been a compliment.

That's William Gibson's "Johnny Mnemonic" and I like it. Smart, articulate, clever people are sometimes so smart, articulate, and clever that they fail to see that sometimes crude solutions are the best ones. Which I mention by way of introducing Ann Friedman's column on "The Byline Gender Gap". She's hardly the first person to have noticed that even in the progressive media there seem to be very few women publishing things. Nor does she have an especially novel analysis of why this is the case. Indeed -- and here's where the meritorious crudeness starts to come into play -- she doesn't do much analysis of why it's the case at all. She just sees a big problem and proposes a crude solution: "I've come to believe that a target percentage for women's bylines should be set in the editorial policies of each publication, at least in the short term."

I think she's right. This is obviously not the most abstractly elegant fix, but I don't think resolutions to do better in the future will have much impact unless they result in a reasonably clear operational rule of the sort suggested here.

Comments

Yes, advocating hiring quotas is exactly what progressives should be doing these days. Marvelous idea.

Posted by Dave | October 10, 2006 10:32 AM

I second that. If you don't think that people with the genitals outside their body are inherently superior as .... (fill in the blank), and they are overrepresented, then covert discrimination is in play, and needs to be balanced by overt affirmative action.

Why is this argument so difficult to understand?

Posted by Dan Karreman | October 10, 2006 10:38 AM

Obviously, I'm seconding Matt, not Dave.

Posted by Dan Karreman | October 10, 2006 10:39 AM

Query whether there's a WNBA problem here. What do the gender demographics of opinion articles look like?

Posted by SomeCallMeTim | October 10, 2006 10:41 AM

Err..."What do the gender demographics for consumers of opinion articles look like?"

Posted by SomeCallMeTim | October 10, 2006 10:47 AM

Is that a valid comparison, SCMT? I take it as a given that no self-respecting male would voluntarily watch a WNBA game. But why wouldn't a male read an opinion column authored by a woman? Are you assuming that women-authored columns are strictly for women (as the WNBA is strictly for women)? I can think of plenty of counter-examples.

Posted by Al | October 10, 2006 10:55 AM

BTW - I think the valid issue is whether women are equally as interested in producing the relevant kind of journalism, not whether they are equally as interested in consuming such journalism.

It's akin to college sports - women are just not as interested in playing sports as men. I don't think your journalism-equivalent of Title IX is going to change that.

Posted by Al | October 10, 2006 10:57 AM

Too bad the Johnny Mnemonic movie sucked so bad. I got up and left, and I was in the two-dollar theater.

Posted by Dan | October 10, 2006 11:15 AM

It's akin to college sports - women are just not as interested in playing sports as men. I don't think your journalism-equivalent of Title IX is going to change that.

Well, it all depends on what you mean by "change." The evidence seems pretty strong that when women aren't being discriminated against as much, they play more sports or attain higher positions in corporations and all that. Certainly, there are social conditionings that start in childhood that can't be erased by anti-discrimination codes (and maybe there are genetic differences, but that doesn't really matter here), but I don't think that we're currently at a point of complete parity of opportunity such that these conditionings are the primary factor in gender inequality.

So, this policy wouldn't make everything evereywhere equal. But it would work to reduce discrimination and make some things more equal. That's good.

Posted by DivGuy | October 10, 2006 11:18 AM

But why wouldn't a male read an opinion column authored by a woman?

No. I think the small number of women writing well-known opinion columns might be, in part, a function of subject matter (which Friedman mentions) and tone (which seemed to be a widely believed explanation in the last blogospheric discussion of this issue). It seems believable to me that many women focus on issues relating to feminism. Of the well-known female bloggers, the only ones who aren't primarily focused on feminism that come easily to my mind are Beyerstein, GFR, Rozen, and Hamsher and Smith. (NB: I don't read that many blogs, so there are probably many more of which I'm not aware.) Tone is harder to demonstrate--and I'm less sure that it's an explanation I believe--but I hear it referenced as an explanation pretty regularly.

Posted by SomeCallMeTim | October 10, 2006 11:26 AM

What a great suggestion, Matt. Here's another one along the same lines.

Men are wildly over represented in the US prison population. To rememdy this, we should lighten sentences for male offenders and strengthen sentencing for female offenders. In addition, we should make a special effort to arrest more women until the target precentages are reached.

I mean, who could disagree with that?

Posted by Chuchundra | October 10, 2006 11:32 AM

I think generally women are too smart and not egomaniacal enough to become political writers. The pay is lousy.

Posted by chris | October 10, 2006 11:42 AM

HAY MATT BUT MORE MEN DIE IN WAR SO ARE YUO SAYEING WE SHOUD KILL LOTS OF WOMEN TO FIX IT HUH AER YOU!!!!!

Posted by tps12 | October 10, 2006 11:48 AM

I think its a great idea. Admittedly, the MSM is dying, and this would accelerate that death.

The follow up, then, is obvious-to require readers to read a gender-balanced collection of articles as well. This would serve two purposes-it would create the proper, progessive population that we all want, and it would save (due to the mandatory purchasing/consuming of newspapers, magazines, and television news), the MSM.

There is already a precedence; in England, use of televisions requires a mandatory payment to the BBC, and government support to the arts has acclimatized us all to the idea of government funding for the production of art. Its not much of a stretch to tax folks to pay for Mother Jones, or the Nation, or even CBS.

sk

Posted by Steve | October 10, 2006 11:48 AM

The gender gap in blogging might even be bigger than in print media...what are we going to do about that? Maybe Matt should volunteer to shut down?

Posted by ed | October 10, 2006 11:58 AM

I thought Matt was supposed to be the newer, smarter, kind of liberal? Not so much on the affirmative action stuff, apparently.

Men and women have unequal representation in almost every area of human endeavor. You know, being different and all. I await Matt's plans for affirmative action in all the remaining spheres of life.

Posted by MQ | October 10, 2006 12:50 PM

Ditto target percentages bylines by under 35s, by different ethnic groups equal to their position in the population, by undocumented immigrants, by those educated outside elite schools, for the disabled and so forth: Moving step-by-step towards a complete mirror-image representation of all US demographic groups in political commentary.

Posted by otto | October 10, 2006 12:52 PM

I'm curious, did any of the objectors here actually click through to the original article? The suggested response is, in fact, crude, but much of the rationale for it is strong.

For instance, she says more than half the submissions she gets are from women, and most are of high quality. Moreover, publishers' inboxes function as a self-perpetuating, unintentional discrimination tool; knowing a writer's name is the key to actually opening the submission, and the known writers are overwhelmingly men.

Posted by jhupp | October 10, 2006 1:25 PM

"For instance, she says more than half the submissions she gets are from women, and most are of high quality..."

This smells funny to me. I really don't trust the kind of anecdotal "statistics" she offers to bolster her lengthy conjecture on the editorial thought process. (My experience in publishing indicates that most editors are reasonably conscientious and receptive about reading pitches.)

From a practical standpoint, though, I think this is a terrible idea. I agree 100% with "Steve" and "chuchundra"'s modest-proposal-type opinions above.

Posted by Jimbo X | October 10, 2006 1:52 PM

Men and women have unequal representation in almost every area of human endeavor. You know, being different and all.

What is it about 'thought-leader' publications that makes it less likely, based on the differences of the sexes, for women to be published? You say "almost every area," in what areas are there close to equal representation, and what separates those areas from others with unequal representation? How does punditry compare to the different areas...does it share more characteristics with areas that have equal or unequal representation?

Posted by Rambuncle | October 10, 2006 3:01 PM

Well, Chuchundra's modest proposal draws a false analogy; men are overrepresented in prison, but they are also overrepresented among committers of crime. Published articles is a first order problem; jail sentencing is a second order problem.

If the proposal were altered such that the percentage of men and women were closer to the percentage of men and women who actually commit crimes, then easing male sentences and strengthening female sentences wouldn't necessarily be a bad idea. Indeed, I wouldn't be surprised to find that juries go easier on women than on men.

Of course, crime severity would also have to be taken into consideration, since the disparity between men and women in committing crimes grows as the crimes grow more violent. I don't know enough about the numbers to know whether our current sentences are or are not accurate representations of the population once all the relevant information is taken into account.

Now to Steve's proposal: if we require more equal publishing, then there's no need to require more equal reading. Men and women writers would have equal voices in the market, and readers would choose their favorites from the available options. I'm not quite sure I follow how his last paragraph is relevant. Giving them equal opportunities for readership is the point, not giving them equal readership.

I know they're both satirical, but even satire needs a) to avoid drawing false analogies and b) to rest on proper assumptions about the satirized thing.

I admit that her reasoning isn't perfect and is sometimes anecdotal to her own experience, but the entire proposal has the feel of thinking out loud. If we find that most editors have similar experiences, I think it makes a lot of sense.

Indeed, your dismissal of her claim as "fishy" isn't much stronger than her own dismissal as a "cop-out" of colleagues claiming the submissions they get from women are fewer and of less quality. This is the sort of thing one would need to look into before making any sort of definitive pronouncements, but I don't see much reason on face to believe women's submissions would be of lesser quality.

Posted by jhupp | October 10, 2006 4:02 PM

"she says more than half the submissions she gets are from women, and most are of high quality."

Thank you jhupp. This is prima facie evidence of discrimination and of a violation of meritorian principles, and the start of a persuasive case. Why didn't Yglesias also throw in a reason or two for his conclusion?

Posted by rainsborough | October 10, 2006 4:37 PM

I suppose I should like Matt's proposal, since I'm a potential beneficiary of it. But I'm not sure I do. The more immediate concern, it seems to me, is that women tend to get pigeon-holed or steered into writing about, if not "womens" issues, then "softer" issues that often don't have the prestige of issues men are put on tracks to write about. Just look at the pieces written by male and female junior staffers at the New Republic, for example (this may be a bad example, but it's the first one that popped into my head).

Just setting a quota doesn't work because the outcomes in terms of bylines at the top are the cumulative effect of a chain of events in terms of opportunities people are given and directions people are steered that leads to fewer women being in positions where they're the natural choice to fill a particular slot or to call on to write about pressing issue of the day x--unless, of course, pressing issue of the day x happens to be a women's (or possibly children's issue).

Posted by flippantangel | October 10, 2006 6:20 PM

"This is the sort of thing one would need to look into before making any sort of definitive pronouncements..."

jhupp: Exactly. Here's my plan. Have a panel of editors (balanced by gender) blind-read a series of, say 1000 written pieces (without bylines) and rank them in terms of quality. Then take the percentage of the top 100 in rankings that happened to be written by women and allot that percentage to female writers.

My guess, based solely on my experience in magazine publishing, is that the proportion of women to men getting published under such a system will be even lower than it is now. What the underlying reason for that is, I wouldn't begin to speculate, any more than I'd hazard a guess why men commit more crimes than women do.

Posted by Jimbo X | October 10, 2006 6:27 PM

Posts like this, proposing mandatory hiring quotas, is a reminder that, after these elections, for which I have donated time and hundreds of dollars to electing Democrats (which God willing results in the Dems taking back Congress), I am then faced with the next dilemma: the prospect of liberals running things.

Posted by torrentprime | October 10, 2006 6:49 PM

Jimbo, that's interesting. Having exactly zero experience in publishing other people's work, I certainly can't speak to your comment except in wondering why that's the case. As is well documented, the one portion of standardized tests in which women consistently outperform men is the writing section. Obviously, there are myriad problems with standardized testing, but the best evidence we have indicates to me that women are at least as well prepared to write as men are when they're 18. What, if anything, changes from that point forward?

Posted by jhupp | October 10, 2006 7:06 PM

Obviously, there are myriad problems with standardized testing, but the best evidence we have indicates to me that women are at least as well prepared to write as men are when they're 18. What, if anything, changes from that point forward?

This really ought to make you wonder about how well we understand "merit" as regards writing. I wouldn't look to standardized tests for any measure of writing ability; as I recall, there have been a series of studies that find that scores correlate best with length.

Posted by SomeCallMeTim | October 10, 2006 7:31 PM

Why don't you just make a point to keep tabs of the genders of the authors you read, and make sure your reading equal amounts of both. Or you could, you know, evaluate ideas on their own rather than the gender of the author.

Posted by Travis | October 10, 2006 7:52 PM

In the dreamworld of the male commenter, readers know what they want, editors know what they want, and editors choose the best writers to provide the best content the readers want. In this world Harpers and the Nation have small circulations because their readers are the intellectual leaven of a national lumpenproletariet.

In the real world, small magazines stay small because they cannot provide a compelling vision of what their readers want to see. The readers read what is set before them in the hopes of broadening their minds, in spite of the discouraging experience of continually reading "experts" pontificating solemnly on subjects that never seem to matter to anyone the reader actually knows.

How could this get any worse by establishing a quota system and printing what your authors provided?

In fact, given the dismal track record of the editors to date, this would improve the content, and give the authors a much more direct influence in the publication than they've had before. None of the journals we're discussing are suffering from too much democracy in the pressroom.

As for the idea that there aren't enough qualified female authors out there, o pulleeze. Not like we've never heard that before.

Posted by serial catowner | October 10, 2006 8:05 PM

As for the idea that there aren't enough qualified female authors out there, o pulleeze.

I don't think we're all saying that. I don't have any idea what's driving the gender disparity at issue here. I'm happy to believe that sexism is a part of it. I'm just not sure that it's all of it.

Posted by SomeCallMeTim | October 10, 2006 8:17 PM

I forget all the sources for this and I'm too lazy to google it, but there was some orchestra that decided to see how much knowing the sex of an applicant influenced whether they were hired. So they had people audition behind a screen, and lo and behold, the number of women who were accepted into the orchestra increased significantly.

Studies have been done on how people grade essays written by women and men according to what they think the sex of the author is, and, no matter how they mix up the names on the essays, the ones with male-sounding names on them get higher marks than the ones with female-sounding names.

When I did fanzines, I was constantly reading articles listing the best fanzines that were currently in publication, written by guys who routinely told me that my latest issue was brilliant, that I put out a great fanzine, etc., and yet in their articles they never listed me. When I'd ask them about this, they'd say they just forgot, but it never seemed to strike them as odd that they always seemed to forget The Woman.

Now I do a blog, and the same damn thing happens. There are even people who seem to think I'm brilliant right up until they figure out that I'm not a guy, and then suddenly they stop linking me, stop mentioning me as a top blog writer, etc. Or, of course, the ones who read me every day, think I'm really great, and then go ahead and write the "Where are all the female bloggers?" posts as if I don't even exist. (Remember Kevin Drum doing this?)

If I were running a newspaper, I'd have no trouble finding women to put on the op-ed pages - I'd just have trouble picking which ones, because there are so many good choices just from the liberal blogosphere.

There are plenty of good female writers out there, and they are not just writing about feminist issues by any stretch of the imagination. It's just that for some guys, that's all they see, and they don't notice the rest.

Posted by Avedon | October 10, 2006 8:34 PM

I forget all the sources for this and I'm too lazy to google it, but there was some orchestra that decided to see how much knowing the sex of an applicant influenced whether they were hired

I'm almost certain this was in Blink, and so possibly in the New Yorker.

Posted by SomeCallMeTim | October 10, 2006 8:36 PM

Jews are definitely overrepresented in the commentary business, I think Catholics are too, so we should be having quota systems to guarantee representation for Protestants as well.

Don't forget the quotas for male writers in the lifestyle pages and fashion press.

And Avedon...sorry there missy, what were you saying again??

Posted by MQ | October 10, 2006 8:41 PM

"How could this get any worse by establishing a quota system and printing what your authors provided? In fact, given the dismal track record of the editors to date, this would improve the content "

The fact that you don't like what current small political magazines publish should give some hints as to why you aren't writing for one. I think Vogue should publish me -- my interminable screeds on military history can't possibly be worse than the incredibly boring coverage of skirt length and fall colors that's in there now. Who could possibly be reading that stuff?

Posted by MQ | October 10, 2006 8:48 PM

I'm sorry, but I think my analogy/satire is exactly on point.

Obviously, prison population is overwhelmingly male, for the most part, because men commit more crimes. There are issues with regard to arrests and sentencing, but the issue certainly isn't a roughly equal number of men and women winding through the justice system with more men being given the slam and more women being set free.

But this is the same issue with publishing. Do you really think that there are a significant number of editors that are are passing over good material that they would otherwise publish because the byline reads "Sally Smith" instead of "Steve Smith"? That's just nonsense. Almost all gender quota issues are "second order" problems these days.

Women are not getting their articles published because they aren't submitting articles that editors want to publish. Why is this? I surely don't know. But isn't it better to think about why this is and work on the underlying issues instead of proposing crude solutions?

It's easy to talk about cutting the Gordian Knot. It's a lazy solution. Let's just cut the knot and be done with it. Let the cart roll back over someone's foot and damn the consquences. It's a little different when the ceremonial cart is going to roll back over your foot.

Posted by Chuchundra | October 10, 2006 8:58 PM

There is an even cruder solution. Decide that a gender imbalance is not a problem and move on.

Posted by Glaivester | October 11, 2006 1:21 AM

I wonder how many clueless male commenters here have raised daughters? I have: try explaining to your daughter why she has to read Hatchet by Gary Paulson three years in a row, and why the vast majority of the books she is assigned to read are written by males. And see the look of surprise on the literature teacher's face when you ask about this.

Posted by KathyF | October 11, 2006 7:08 AM

MQ has completely missed my point, as well as apparently confusing me with another commenter and probably guessing wrong about my sex. A hat trick.

The article commented on was about the smaller liberal magazines, and one of the things that makes them smaller is that they don't print the popular stuff. If what they printed was popular, they would be larger. (I hope we're not going too fast for anyone.)

IOW, the content, by definition, is already stuff that most people don't want to read. And, in fact, most of these magazines regularly print articles with the explanation that "you may not think this is important now, but you will after you read this article", or "here's a viewpoint you won't see in the mainstream press".

I know this will be a tricky concept for some to grasp, but the editorial choices at these magazines are already biased and irrational. That's their selling point- we are liberals, and we print what we think is important.

So maybe they should start thinking that printing women authors is liberal and important.

Posted by serial catowner | October 11, 2006 8:46 AM

'Do you really think that there are a significant number of editors that are are passing over good material that they would otherwise publish because the byline reads "Sally Smith" instead of "Steve Smith"?
Posted by: Chuchundra on October 10, 2006 08:58 PM

I think it is not so much passing over good material, as publishing bad material by men preferentially over bad material by women.

Let's be honest here, 90% of what is published is filler. Since you can't just write a collumn once every six months, most opinion pieces written by even good writers are not really worth reading. You read them just in case this is the one-in-ten that actually says something. The editors and publishers know that our society is much more tolerant of men bloviating than women. Publishing pieces by women that say nothing is seen as unserious. Publishing pieces by men that say nothing is par for the course.

Posted by Njorl | October 11, 2006 9:45 AM

I wonder how many clueless male commenters here have raised daughters? I have: try explaining to your daughter why she has to read Hatchet by Gary Paulson three years in a row, and why the vast majority of the books she is assigned to read are written by males. And see the look of surprise on the literature teacher's face when you ask about this.
Posted by: KathyF on October 11, 2006 07:08 AM

First, nothing was written by a "male". The word you hate so much is 'men'. These works were written by men, male members of the human species. The fact that you dehumanize men as a matter of course rather illuminates that you have deep and abiding issues, almost certainly hatred is an accurate description.

I have a daughter, and I don't plan to teach her to be a female-supremacist man-hater as you are doing.

If you want to read works only *by* womem, take a feminist literature course, where sexism is the norm. Bet neither you nor your daughter would have one word of complaint if all the reading list was by women.

And I suggest that this is at the heart of the matter, this is the kind of shit women write. Oddly few men enjoy being castigated by a female chauvinist sow. I suggest that were you to be faced with sexism against you of the kind you use against men, you'd take no interest in said publication/blog/newspaper. Well funny thing, most men do the same.

I'm sure you vist many feminist blogs. The hate screed I read in these blogs is frightening. These women then complain that men don't read their blogs. Only other man-hating feminists enjoy these hate screeds, and men who do post in defense get blocked PDQ.

Oh well, I know I'm wasting my time. But were I to read your screed in a paper, I'd stop reading it. Permanantly.

Posted by Rich | October 11, 2006 3:57 PM

She has written nothing in this comment that is hateful in any way. Asking why her daughter doesn't read any books by women is a decent question.

I spent a lot of time thinking about this, too. I went to a grade school and middle school staffed exclusively with female teachers, but between fifth and eighth grades, I think we read one book written by a woman (To Kill a Mockingbird). I went to an all boys high school, so there it was more understandable, but the only things we read by women were "The Yellow Wallpaper" and Frankenstein.

When I was growing up, my father read (and loved) Hatchett to me at bedtime. So to with Johnny Tremaine and Kim. But he also read The Little House books, and they had as great an effect on me as the others. It's not man-hating to wonder why our kids don't read more work written by women. It's a genuinely decent question.

Why didn't we read any Jane Austen or Louisa May Alcott or Edith Wharton in high school? These are seminal writers in the English language canon, but we didn't read them because we were all boys and would have had trouble relating to the characters.

Well, put women in a classroom with books solely by and about men; what sort of education is that? My sister went to an all girls school, and our high school reading lists almost never overlapped. She read books by and about women. That's fine. But in a mixed gender setting, half the class is going to have the gender relation problem with any book. It's self-evidently unfair that it be the same half of the class for every book.

Posted by jhupp | October 11, 2006 4:46 PM

She has written nothing in this comment that is hateful in any way. Asking why her daughter doesn't read any books by women is a decent question.

No, she's complaining about reading books written by males, not men. Men are human, males are not.

Neither she or you has posted anything wrong with books written by men. And indeed, the only possible reason for this objection is sexism. When the sexism is against men, no matter how blatant, the silence is deafening.

Can you name one thing wrong with books written by men? Be specific. Saying you hate men is an explanation, but it is not something wrong with the books per se.

FYI, feminism claims that the workforce should be 51% women, cause women and 'males' are equal and all that. If women and 'males' *are* equal, then WTF is the problem with books written by 'males'?

No one is forcing her daughter to read only books written by those ikky 'males' she hates so much BTW. I bet any books her mother provides are written 100% my women. But I know that's never a problem, is it?

Posted by Rich | October 11, 2006 6:45 PM

It's not a question of books by men being not good enough; they're great! I love books by men! But the appreciation of literature (since that's where she took the comment thread) hinges largely on identifying with the character or seeing yourself in that situation. The situations, particularly of books that take place in a realistic setting (not sci-fi or fantasy), of men and women have for millenia been quite different. The situations of men and women today are the result of those millenia. Each of us has a sort of inherited sex history that varies further with our family's or country's or religion's or what have you's approach to gender roles.

Simply put, it's not realistic to expect a girl to appreciate a book by and about a man in the same way she would appreciate one by and about a woman. Neither is it realistic to expect a boy to appreciate a book by and about a woman in the same way he would appreciate one by and about a man. Her daughter deserves the same opportunity to identify with the characters in the literature she reads in school that the boys in her class have.

As to the males/men problem, they were written by males (as you yourself pointed out, men are human males), though I do understand the point you're making. But I won't really put much stock in this particular argument without an analagous reference in Kathy's comment to "women" where "females" would have worked. She didn't make such a reference. The words "woman" and "women" are both 100% absent from her comment. If I were to hazard a guess, I'd say she said "male commenters" because she doesn't know how old the commenters are. Then, when referring to authors, she just used the same word again because that's what people do.

Finally, no, it's no problem if her mother provides her books only by women, but it would be a problem if the same happened in school, given that half her classmates are probably boys. There's nothing wrong with books by men, nor is there anything wrong with books by women. As long as her mother is trying to get her to read good books, I'm all for it.

Posted by jhupp | October 11, 2006 7:28 PM

Finally, no, it's no problem if her mother provides her books only by women, but it would be a problem if the same happened in school, given that half her classmates are probably boys. There's nothing wrong with books by men, nor is there anything wrong with books by women. As long as her mother is trying to get her to read good books, I'm all for it.

The schools are there to provide an education, apparently you claim that women cannot get an education reading books written by men. Oddly this has never been recognised as a problem until today, when books by men are recognised as being bad in some undefinable fashion.

Either the sex (not gender) of the author is relevant, or it is not. You claim that it is for some vague handwaving reason. Please show me the evidence that girls are not getting a good education, as all the evidence is that schools today cater exclusively to girls and that boys are falling far behind. Clearly you don't have any real concerns about students getting what they are in school for, an education. Instead you attack source material for 100% sexist reasons.

Can you provide *any* actual evidence that girls can't learn algebra from a book written by a man (not for men as you claim, just by a man)?

Posted by Rich | October 11, 2006 7:39 PM

This is the last I'll respond to this topic because it doesn't seem like we're getting anywhere.

1) You can't tell me to provide evidence that girls aren't getting a good education (they are, but it could be better) and then not provide any evidence yourself that shows schools are catering "exclusively to girls," which on its face is obviously hyperbole that you're trying to use as sober analysis.

2) I'm not talking about algebra; I'm talking about literature. I actually have no idea if the sex of the book's writer has anything to do with the girl's ability to learn algebra, but I suspect it doesn't matter at all. I'm talking about her ability to identify with the characters in a piece of literature. Again, that was pretty clearly the subject of the comment about which you and I are writing.

I mean, look, if you want to say every effort to achieve literary equity is an act of sexism, you can do that. But you have to give me a reason to believe it's true. "Men write good books, and girls can learn from them. Any effort to get more books written by women into the classroom is therefore sexism," is not a compelling argument in any way, not when you're completely ignoring my argument that girls will identify better with female (WOW, I must hate women!) characters, which is an essential element in appreciating literature. If that's as far as you're willing to go, then congratulations, you've successfully duped me into a discussion with you when you aren't going to offer any real effort to discuss (in other words, trolling).

Posted by jhupp | October 11, 2006 9:20 PM

1) You can't tell me to provide evidence that girls aren't getting a good education (they are, but it could be better) and then not provide any evidence yourself that shows schools are catering "exclusively to girls," which on its face is obviously hyperbole that you're trying to use as sober analysis.

You've not provided any evidence, at all. You have posted much supposition and supported the idea that (apparently) there is a problem if girls have to read literature written by men. So far it remains supposition. Attacking me for not doing what you have not done is no "sober analysis", as you seem to think.

As for the status of boys, I'll bet that you have no information at all, and probably could care less anyway. Nothing I can do about this so I'll pass.

2) I'm not talking about algebra; I'm talking about literature. I actually have no idea if the sex of the book's writer has anything to do with the girl's ability to learn algebra, but I suspect it doesn't matter at all. I'm talking about her ability to identify with the characters in a piece of literature. Again, that was pretty clearly the subject of the comment about which you and I are writing.

I'm talking about an education, you know, the sole reason kids are in school in the first place.

As for girls not being able to relate to works by men, you've established only that this is your belief. I'm surprised that you've not claimed that girls can't reate to works by women, as clearly girls can have at best very few common experiences. Hell, how can they relate to girl characters with different names? Just how bad are girls at relating anyway?

Literature is only a small part of anything shy of a college major in literature. And I think your objections are still open to discussion, although you don't seem to think so.

And I don't see that relating to a character is the essence of learning. But then, despite the feminist claims about diversity, feminist diversity has never included men.

I mean, look, if you want to say every effort to achieve literary equity is an act of sexism, you can do that.

Every bit of sexism remains sexism, call it "literary equity", 'gender norming' or even 'Affirmative Discrimination' and it remains sexism. A rose by any other name and all that rot. Oh wait, that was Shakespeare and girls can't relate to that.

But you have to give me a reason to believe it's true.

I realize that pro-female sexism is the norm today and that few can even identify it, no matter how blatant it is. You just underscore that point. How ironic that this happens in a discussion involving education.

Any effort to get more books written by women into the classroom is therefore sexism

Your gate is sex, period. Not quality, not how well they educate, but the sex of the author. You've invented a problem for which you posit some rather blatant sexism as the answer. And astoundingly, apparently you cannot even identify your own blatant sexism. And I don't expect this to stop at literature, they never do. Once you establish the vital importance of the sex of the author, you've opened the gates for vetting all books and works. This may well be the intent.

not when you're completely ignoring my argument that girls will identify better with female characters

I'm sorry, I don't see that your unsupported supposition is reason to do anything or change anything. You have no interest in even trying to substantiate your supposition, so clearly you don't care if it does have substance.

which is an essential element in appreciating literature

Wow, another unsupported supposition. You build a tall tower of cards, but it remains that one supposition cannot substantiate another.

Look, I understand that this is your belief system. But I don't pray at your altars. And I don't want my children to be taught your religion, or by it. Do what you wish in your own home, but please, keep it there.

This is a key failing about anything feminist BTW, it is not open to discussion, and attemting discussion always fails.

Posted by Rich | October 12, 2006 12:43 PM

"I've come to believe that a target percentage for women's bylines should be set in the editorial policies of each publication, at least in the short term."

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Posted by Rich | October 12, 2006 6:47 PM