FUN FACT OF THE DAY. There was a bit of debate on this site and elsewhere this fall about whether the female editor of The New York Times editorial pages, Gail Collins, who was stepping down, could have had more of an impact than she did on the percent of women published on that page. Having been looking into a variety of questions around women and opinion journalism as a fellow at the Shorenstein Center at Harvard this fall, it's come to my attention that The New York Times op-ed page actually got its first woman editor in 1974 -- when former women's section editor Charlotte Curtis took the helm after transforming the women's page into a must-read -- so Collins is a bit less of a pioneer in this arena than people might have supposed (Similarly, the The Nation magazine had a female editor from 1933 to 1955, Freda Kirchwey, making Katrina vanden Heuvel that magazine's second female chief.) I'm unaware of any data comparing Collins' tenure to Curtis' tenure (which was, admittedly, in the position David Shipley now holds and so not identical), to the tenures of other editors, but from all of my research it seems pretty clear that the forces that had the most significant impact on changing women's patterns of publication came from the demand side. When, in the 1970s, women demanded more and different sorts of articles by women, and women journalists simultaneously sought more diverse professional opportunities, the sorts of articles in the paper and the sorts of jobs available to women journalists began to markedly change.
In our own era, there is almost no demand-side pressure from the public at large, and only a modicum of demand for more women from within the profession. Hence: the period of stasis we are in.
--Garance Franke-Ruta
