THE GREAT EQUALITY DEBATE. I seem to have inadvertantly caused a bit of a ruckus with a comment I dashed off about the women and the opinionating business over at Prospect-contributot Jane Hamsher‘s place. Fortunately, the profession as a whole is better than my item might have suggested, and rather than chucking it all and going into real estate I will, like Amy Sullivan, be temporarily stepping back next fall, though in my case to study this issue as a fellow at the Joan Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics, and Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. The only solution to vexing questions is more reporting, after all, and I hope by the end of the year to have some real answers to the question of why there are so few women in the opinion biz. To be a journalist is to have an abiding faith in the power of empiricism, and in this arena, in particular, people have a lot of theories but there’s been little real Nancy Hopkins-style research. Sometimes this topic seems more inflammatory to write about than it should; it’s 2006, after all, and most major news organizations, such as The New York Times and The Washington Post, have devoted considerable resources over the years to studying their own internal dynamics, documenting them, and institutionalizing change. Progressive media could benefit from following the calmly reasonable model of the MSM here.
That’s also why I’d love to see Amy’s evidence for her contention that “the problem is getting better, not worse.” The data I’m working with and have spent the past six months gathering says otherwise. I’ll address her specific points first, then get into some of that. Amy points to the talented crop of female assistant editors at The New Republic, which she says is a trainee position for being a staff writer (also known as fact-checkers and copy-editors). I think if she looks back in time a bit, though, she’ll find that no woman has actually been promoted into a political writing job from that post since the days of Ruth Shalit and Hanna Rosin back in the late 1990s. Michelle Cottle was hired by Chuck Lane back when I was a reporter-researcher at TNR, in 1998-1999, direct from The Washington Monthly. Women have been hired up the masthead in production and editing jobs since then, but not political writing ones. That may be set to change, as Amy says, and I hope it is.
The Washington Monthly, which hires its editors for roughly two-year stints, has graduated a number of women in recent years, and has generally speaking been successful in maintaining an even gender ratio at the editing level since the mid-to-late 1990s, when I started paying attention to such things, though the same can hardly be said at the level of published work. My apologies to the whole WaMo gang for not calling to see who they’d selected to replace Amy before posting my comment, though, again, I should emphasize I wrote it as an offhand blog comment based on what I’d last heard, and not as the carefully crafted final word on anything intended for front page status across the ‘sphere. (Plus they really need to update their outdated online masthead. That said, I do find it interesting that of the last five female Washington Monthly editors — again, last I’d heard, please write me if I’m wrong — only one works as full-time, ongoing media-institution employee. Including Amy, two are definteily writing books, one has several part-time gigs, one is free-lancing and (maybe?) writing a book, and one works for a newspaper full-time. Now, it’s possible that writing books is both more interesting and more lucrative than working as an employee some place — and if what my publishing sources tell me is true, I bow down before Amy’s solid six-figure advance — as well as being something that’s more compatible with child-bearing and rearing. It’s also the case that a substantial portion of the male magazine and newspaper opinion world creates a work-life out of a mish-mash of part-time gigs. Still, if you look at the guys coming out of the same position, the majority of them have full-time jobs. Something’s up, something that impacts who winds up where over time, I suspect, as well as the choices that people make. Because every one of those women could have had a full-time editing or writing job if she’d wanted it.
And finally, TAP. Dear, dear TAP. We have been remiss. I’ve looked through back-issues going back to our founding, and as far as I can tell I’m the only female staff writer we’ve had in our 16 years (or the second, if you count Ellen Miller, who was a senior fellow here). We don’t have a any regular female columnists writing about politics for us, either in the magazine or online. And in the eight years we have had a writing fellows program, no women have been hired for staff jobs from that post, far as I can tell from the mastheads, while seven men have made the jump to staff from intern or writing fellow. Perhaps that’s a reflection of who we’ve hired as fellows: Since, I’ve been at TAP, only one of the six writing fellows has been a woman. What it’s not a reflection of is women not putting themselves forward, as Amy reported was the case at The Washington Monthly, since that 17 percent female pool of recent fellows came out of an applicant pool that was, at least in the one year whose numbers I’m familiar with, 37 percent female. What are the reasons for these dynamics? I have some theories, which I’ll outline in my next post.
