"Women Have Better Things To Do"

Thanks to eagle-eyed Times-watcher Dave, who noticed on Saturday that the aforementioned Times had an article on what sort of people write into the paper.

From it we learn that the Times receives around 600 letters a day, of which about 18 get selected for publication. We also learn that at least one Times reader has taken it upon himself to conduct an informal study of the gender breakdown of those whose letters are published:

Duncan Grey writes from Cambridge: "I've just taken a quick count of male to female contributors to the letters page over the past few weeks. My calculations show that 83 per cent of writers are men, 11 per cent are women and some 6 per cent are either joint writers or of uncertain gender. Who is responsible for this? Gender-biased editors, domineering husbands or some other factor? Could it be that The Times does not appeal to women, or that women prefer to tend to kittens and cooking while their menfolk pore over the paper?"

The reporter, Sally Baker, responds thus:

The published ratio broadly mirrors that of letters received, although the other reason in my view is that women have better things to do with their time than write letters to newspapers.

I'm pleased to see that Duncan received a proper response to his letter to the Times, whereas I didn't to my very similar letter to the Guardian.

But I'm not so pleased to see the return of our old friend 'women have better things to do' as the supposed reason for women's reluctance to write to the papers. In my experience, 'women have better things to do' is a false compliment. It almost suggests that women should 'know their place'.

And no prizes for guessing what that 'place' is, either. Independent columnist Mary Dejevsky, remember, reckoned that women had better things to do with their time than write blogs. Those 'better things' turned out to be cooking dinner for their husbands and looking after the kids.

If by any chance Sally Baker is reading this, I would very much like to know what those 'better things' are that she believes women spend their time doing. If it's staying out of the public sphere and keeping quiet about things that matter, I'm not sure I'd agree.

In the meantime, you can amuse yourself by going to Google and looking up 'women have better things to do than' and 'women have better things to do with their time than'. Playing chess, playing computer games, making money, writing a diary, being included in the history books, discussing obscure records - all these and many more things are beneath us, apparently.

The Guardian Responds!

Well, not a response as such, but at least an acknowledgement. This blog was featured in the 'Internet' section of Saturday's Guardian Guide, in the 'What we learned on the web this week' column. It says:

'More men write into the Guardian than women. A lot more.' tinyurl46usfy

But is that *really* the case, or is the large discrepancy between genders on the letters pages due to another of the possible reasons listed at the end of this post? I still don't know.

Nothing To See Here

Hello all, just a note to say that I'm declaring this blog dormant until such time as I receive a reply from either or both of the letters editors to my email below.

I'll alert you to any updates on the other blog, so no need to keep checking in here. Alternatively, you may like to subscribe to this blog's RSS feed in a feed reader of your choice, so you can see when it's been updated.

Many thanks to you all for all of your contributions and suggestions and words of encouragement!

UPDATE: Unless, of course, any of you feel like writing to the letters editors too...in which case the emails are letters at guardian.co.uk and letters at observer.co.uk.

The Silence Of The Letters Editors

No reply yet from either Letters Editor, and Statcounter says they haven't been in to look here either. But the email only went off on Sunday, so it's early days. In the meantime, here's what I sent:

Dear Guardian and Observer letters editors,

I wonder if you could help shed light on something for me. I've just completed a month-long study of the gender split between the writers of letters published in the Guardian and the Observer, and I've been recording the results in a blog here.

My original aim was to question whether the letters pages of both newspapers reflected the actual gender split in the papers' readerships. This was specifically in order to query a point that Nigel Willmott made in a Guardian article in March about the editorially-controlled letters page providing a more useful service to readers than the free-for-all of online commenting.

The results suggest that the letters pages in no way reflect the actual readership – there are far more published letters from men than from women in both papers - but I am wondering why this is so. Is it the case that far fewer women write letters to the editor? Do you think it's because you tend to publish letters from public figures, and public figures tend to be men? I'm afraid I started off with the assumption that it was all down to (conscious or subconscious) sexism, but my readers and I have since come up with a number of theories, which are listed at the end of this post.

I'd be very interested to hear your views on the subject, and if you could give me some idea of the gender split in the correspondence your papers receive, I'd be really very grateful. I also hope you won’t mind me publishing your replies – along with this email – on the blog in question.

Many thanks in advance,

Patroclus [only signed with my real name, obviously]

I will, of course, keep you fully informed of any developments.

The Grand Totals

Here are the grand totals for both newspapers for the period 17th April - 16th May 2008. See the two posts below for the individual results for the Guardian and the Observer.

First, the gender split in raw numbers:


And then in percentages:


I'm not sure what I've proved, other than that there *is* a fairly major discrepancy in the way each gender is represented on the letters page of the Guardian and the Observer.

In that sense, the hunch that I had at the beginning was correct (incidentally, I thought that this would make me feel triumphant: as it turns out, it just makes me feel a bit deflated and depressed). But I'm still no nearer to knowing why, or whether that discrepancy is the result of sexism (conscious or subconscious) or simply due to the fact that fewer women write in to the papers in question.

For those of you who are wondering why I still haven't just emailed the letters editors to ask what proportion of letter-writers are female and what proportion male, the answer is I'm hesitating to do so because I know I won't get a statistically correct answer but rather one based on gut feelings, and gut feelings tend towards over- and under-estimation. I'll send off my emails today though, and see what comes back. If nothing else, it might eliminate some of the theories put forward here.

The Final Reckoning: The Observer

I only have four weeks of data for the Observer, so these figures are less telling than those of the Guardian. But nevertheless, here we are.

A reminder of the actual gender split in the Observer readership (note it's slightly more even than that of the Guardian):


Here's how each gender was represented on the letters page over a four-week period:


And expressed as a percentage so you can compare with the first chart:


At 67:29, it's a better showing than the Guardian (73:23), but it's still way off the actual readership split.

The Final Reckoning: The Guardian

Sorry to anyone who's been coming in looking for THE FINAL RECKONING: I was overtaken by a load of work last week. Here we go, though - I'll do the Guardian first, then the Observer, then the GRAND TOTALS.

First up, a reminder of what the actual gender split of the Guardian readership looks like:


Now let's look at how many letters published on the Guardian letters page between 17th April and 16th May 2008 were written by men, and how many by women:


And expressed as percentages:


Now, I would say that even taking into account possible margins of error (I had a comment a few posts back from a woman called Jamie - but if I'd seen her in the Guardian I would have automatically counted her as a man), there is a lot of discrepancy between the gender split of the Guardian readership and the gender split of Guardian letter-writers who have their letters published.

This doesn't of course, automatically mean that the Guardian letters editor is biased against female correspondents. There are several possible reasons for the discrepancy. Here they are again:

1. Fewer women write letters to the editor in the first place.
This one seems the most likely (especially as the letters editor of the Times Higher Educational supplement said in January that 95%* of the letters written to the publication are by men), but it does open up the field for a load of sub-theories about why this should be the case.

2. Women do write letters to the editor, but only on a narrow range of topics.
These tend to be traditionally 'female' topics like domestic violence, abortion, anorexia and equal rights in the workplace.

3. Women do write letters to the editor, but are less likely to be selected for publication.
Precedence is granted to letters from public figures, who tend to be men. In the absence of a letter from a public figure, precedence is automatically granted to male correspondents because they are - consciously or subconsciously - assumed by the (male) letters editor to have more authority or higher social status.

4. Women do write letters to the editor on a broad range of topics, but are more likely to be selected for publication when they're writing about 'female' issues.
Women are seen to be authorities on typically female topics, but not on topics of more general interest (unless the letter-writer is also a public figure or a senior academic working in the subject area).

**NEW!** 5. Very few women write letters to the editor, but proportionately more of them get their letters published.
The Guardian letters editor, being (we assume) a liberal, left-leaning sort of individual, feels he must represent the views of female readers on the letters page, despite the fact that very few women actually write in. Therefore, he chooses a disproportionately large number of female-authored letters for publication in an attempt to provide at least some sort of balance.

Hopefully before long I'll have an answer to all this.

Guardian, Friday 16th May 2008

Friday's totals:


And topics:


Stand by for THE FINAL RECKONING...

Guardian, Thursday 15th May 2008

Today's tally:


And topics:

Guardian, Wednesday 14th May 2008

Sadly the agreeable egalitarianism of yesterday's letters page didn't last:


Today's topics:


In a way we can take a positive message from this, though, because it's clear that a lot of men are writing about issues that might (wrongly) be identified as 'female' areas of interest, e.g. education, social care, environmentalism.

It would be nice to see more women's letters about issues that are (wrongly) identified as 'male', such as politics, defence, business, rock music, science, sport, technology and a hundred other things I'm sure you can think of. Then perhaps these false distinctions would begin to fade from our collective subconscious.

Guardian, Tuesday 13th May 2008

An unusually balanced showing in Tuesday's Guardian, which is almost reflective of the real-life gender split of the paper's readership (only if the one 'indeterminate' is a woman, though):


Plus, letters from women on a variety of topics, none of which are immediately identifiable as 'female' issues:


I don't think I would have much to complain about if the distribution looked like this every day. I'm still wondering why it doesn't.

Guardian, Monday 12th May 2008

Well, I appear to have temporarily mislaid yesterday's Observer, but here in the meantime are today's results from the Guardian:


And the topics:

Guardian, Saturday 10th May and Week Total

I'm angry about lots of things today, and I'm fully aware that the disproportionate gender representation on the Guardian's letters pages is one of the least of all our problems, but it's not doing anything to make me any less angry:


Today's topics:


And this week's totals in full (click on the 'week totals' label at the bottom to see results for previous weeks):


James Ink asked me how long I'm going to keep recording these totals for, and now I come to think of it I reckon I will keep going for another week, to make it a month in all. Then I'll get in touch with the Graun to see what the actual split is, and report back.

ALSO: Why have the pictures gone small again? That's making me angry too. GrrRRRRRRR!!!!

Guardian, Friday 9th May 2008

Today's tally:


And topics:

Guardian, Thursday 8th May 2008

Today's results:


And topics:

Guardian, Wednesday 7th May 2008

There are some days when I don't see a lot of point continuing with this study, and today is one of them.


Today's topics:


Let's recap the theories put forward so far for why there are almost always far fewer letters published from women than from men:

1. Fewer women write letters to the editor in the first place.
This one seems the most likely (especially as the letters editor of the Times Higher Educational supplement said in January that 95%* of the letters written to the publication are by men), but it does open up the field for a load of sub-theories about why this should be the case.

2. Women do write letters to the editor, but only on a narrow range of topics.
These tend to be traditionally 'female' topics like domestic violence, abortion, anorexia and equal rights in the workplace.

3. Women do write letters to the editor, but are less likely to be selected for publication.
Precedence is granted to letters from public figures, who tend to be men. In the absence of a letter from a public figure, precedence is automatically granted to male correspondents because they are - consciously or subconsciously - assumed by the (male) letters editor to have more authority or higher social status.

4. Women do write letters to the editor on a broad range of topics, but are more likely to be selected for publication when they're writing about 'female' issues.
Women are seen to be authorities on typically female topics, but not on topics of more general interest (unless the letter-writer is also a public figure or a senior academic working in the subject area).


* We can assume this isn't a scientifically accurate figure, but rather a figure based on the letters editor's impression of the gender split among letter-writers.

Guardian, Tuesday 6th May 2008

A slightly more respectable showing today, although still way off the 57:43 ratio that characterises the paper's actual readership:


Today's topics:


When I first started this project, Billy and Llewtrah both wondered what proportion of all letters to the Guardian were written by Keith Flett.

I have to say I haven't seen a single letter from him in either the Guardian or the Observer since I started counting, but never fear, for he has written one to me!

Keith says:

'Very interesting [although taking into account that letters are ephemeral and there are other things..] it might be worth considering that usually and certainly at the moment the letters editors of the 'broadsheets' are all men! There has been a similar debate in the Times Higher recently.

And indeed there has - the 24th Jan 2008 issue of the Times Higher Education supplement has this article, which investigates why so few of the letters published in the supplement are from women. And guess what? According to the article:

'A glance at the letters page for 14 December 2007 reveals six female names. Was that a typical week? Definitely not, the letters editor tells me. On average, about 95 per cent of the letters received each week come from men'.

The article goes on to examine why this is so - and we come up against the usual arguments that women are 'too busy', either with work, or childcare, or both, to write to the newspapers. It also suggests that women lack the confidence and self-belief to air their opinions in public - although, somewhat contradictorily, the journalist argues that this has not been the case in the past.

Those arguments will sound very familiar to anyone who remembers the legendary Mary Dejevsky article in the Independent, which claimed that women don't keep blogs for exactly the same reasons.

But the thing is, we know for a fact that women keep blogs in practically equal numbers to men. So we know that those arguments about being busy, or not being confident enough, don't hold true for women's tendencies to express themselves online.

So to go back to the original point of this enquiry, if women are too busy or too diffident to write to the papers, but are perfectly comfortable expressing their opinions online, can the Guardian letters editor really say that the letters page provides a better service to the whole Guardian readership than the online commenting facility?

Guardian, Monday 5th May 2008

Bank Holiday Monday's Guardian showing a by-now familiar distribution:


Here are the topics covered:


On the subject of whether or not women are as inclined as men to express their views, Sarah pointed me at a series of extracts from language professor Deborah Cameron's recent book The Myth of Mars and Venus: Do Men and Women Speak Different Languages?

You can read the three extracts, which were published last Oct in the Guardian, here:

1. What Language Barrier?

2. Speak Up, I Can't Hear You

3. Back Down to Earth

While it's all very interesting to read, and highly recommended, I think the most relevant point that Cameron makes in relation to my project (and the one that Sarah mentioned) is the relationship between the tendency to speak publicly and the status - real or perceived - of the speaker. Cameron says:

'The basic trend, especially in formal and public contexts, is for higher-status speakers to talk more than lower-status ones. The gender pattern is explained by the observation that in most contexts where status is relevant, men are more likely than women to occupy high-status positions; if all other things are equal, gender itself is a hierarchical system in which men are regarded as having higher status.

That could explain the discrepancies on the letters page of the Guardian: it often publishes letters from 'prominent' or 'high-status' public figures, who - as we all know - tend to be men. Perhaps this suggests that the Guardian does after all receive many more letters from men than from women.

However, Cameron says that men only 'talk more' (or, for the purposes of this study, write more letters) when the subject under discussion is not an obviously gendered one:

'Some experimental studies have found that you can reverse the "men talk more" pattern, or at least reduce the gap, by instructing subjects to discuss a topic that both sexes consider a distinctively female area of expertise.'

This is a point that Tim made a while back: perhaps women write letters in greater numbers when they're writing about identifiably 'female' topics. But a quick look back over the results gathered so far reveals that on some individual days (although not necessarily overall), the Guardian has published more letters from women than from men on the following topics:

1. Women's rights in the workplace (including equal pay, maternity pay, flexible working arrangements to accommodate childcare, etc.).

2. The abolition of the 10p tax rate.

3. The discrepancy between the amount of money donated to animal charities (specifically donkey sanctuaries) and the amount donated to women's charities (specifically for victims of domestic violence).

4. Domestic violence.

5. Islamist extremism.

Which is interesting, because I certainly wouldn't have put the 10p tax rate abolition or extreme Islamism down as particularly 'female' issues. So is it the case that women are writing in greater numbers only when the subject under discussion is a 'female' subject, or are they writing in appreciable numbers on a broad range of topics, but only being published when the topic is identifiably 'female'?

Observer, Sunday 4th May 2008

Sorry for the tardiness with this one: I was making blueberry muffins, taking dogs for a walk in the early summer sunshine and visiting friends for dinner.

Here are the results from yesterday's Observer:


And here are the topics:


Click on the 'observer' label below to see previous results for the Observer.

Guardian, Saturday 3rd May 2008

Not a great result today:


Today's topics:


And the results for the week just gone (see last week's total):


Ind. = 'Indeterminate'

Although the data is building up nicely, James Ink reminded me yesterday that it's practically useless unless we know what proportion of letter-writers to the Guardian are women and what proportion men. If 70% of them are men, then the kind of distribution illustrated above is absolutely fair and only to be expected - even if the actual readership of the paper is more equally split (57% men, 43% women).

The actual gender split of letter-writers is something I would very much like to know, but I don't plan to ask the Graun and Observer before I've collated a lot of data first about the current distribution of male and female-authored letters on the letters pages. So this blog shouldn't (yet) be seen as a fait accompli, but as a work in progress.

But James raised an additional interesting point, which is that men may simply be generally more inclined to voice their opinions than women. It's eminently possible - I've certainly spent a lot of evenings in the pub with a lot of men who enjoyed voicing their opinions on every subject under the sun, and the more lager that was consumed, the more opinions they appeared to muster.

But on the other hand, there are indications that women are no less disposed to airing their views in public. For a start, there's the fact that around half (46%) of American bloggers are women (full report available here). For another thing, of all the 14 blogs run by the Gawker empire, the one that apparently* attracts the most comments is Jezebel, the gossip and politics site that's almost exclusively frequented by women.

But on the other hand, the women who comment on Jezebel do so mainly because they like being part of a commenting community, where they can interact with other commenters as well as with the site's editors. So perhaps women are more inclined to voice their opinions in a place where they can have a genuine discussion, rather than have their name printed in the paper. Who knows? If you know, or if you have any views or anecdotes or research or good links to share, I would love to hear them.


* I say 'apparently' as the only place I've seen this cited is in Jezebel's April Fool post about selling out to Condé Nast - but it certainly *seems* like the most commented...

UPDATE: I emailed Jezebel to ask if it really is the most commented blog in the Gawker stable, and editor Anna Holmes kindly responded thus:

'Our comment numbers are looked at on a month-by-month basis, and many months we are the most commented, although we compete with brother site Kotaku, which “won” April. So it really depends on what month we’re talking about; I think it’s safe to say that we are one of the top two most commented Gawker blogs.'

Guardian, Friday 2nd May 2008

Another not-very-balanced day at Guardian Letters HQ:


Is it because there are no gender-related topics today?



Boz was playing devil's advocate the other day by asking me what proportion of commenters on this blog were male and what proportion female. I can confirm that so far I have had 10 male commenters and seven female commenters - a ratio of 59% to 41%, although it's a bit early to start the whole woolly business of percentages.

I think Boz was trying to establish whether men are more inclined to comment on things in general, which would lead to a naturally greater preponderance of male-authored letters on the Guardian's letters page.

BUT, my main objective isn't to establish whether there's a gender bias on the Guardian's letters page, although that's a necessary part of it. This isn't a feminist enquiry (I am a feminist, but I really hope I'm not the whingeing sort) so much as an enquiry into the way the media works, the way it views its audience, the way it views its own role in catering to that audience, and the way it views the new, more democratic technologies of the web. Stuff that I find fascinating.

So, as an experiment, I'm taking specific issue with something the Guardian's letters editor said about the function of the letters page versus the function of allowing readers to comment online on articles and CiF blog posts.

Specifically, he said that the Guardian letters page provides a service to Guardian readers that is lacking in the online commentary. The implication is that the role of the letters editor is to select the high-quality correspondence and filter out the rubbish, something he says Guardian readers are too 'busy' to do for themselves.

Obviously, that process involves silencing many voices by not selecting them for publication. My thesis (yet to be proved or disproved - I'm just gathering data here) is that female views are less likely to be selected for representation on the letters page than male views. Online, though, all views (apart from the really rude and abusive ones) are given equal space.

And if female views are silenced on the letters page but allowed to be aired online, can the letters editor really say he is providing a valuable service to his readers when 43% of them are women?

Guardian, Thursday 1st May 2008

No time for writing at the moment (dinner guests due), back later...

Guardian, Wednesday 30th April 2008

Today is an important day for this project, so read on...

I've wondered from the start what to do when a single letter has multiple signatories, but I made a decision to count all of them. There are two letters today with multiple signatories, hence the high numbers (which are also typically disproportionate):


Now, this is very interesting. One of today's letters, on the subject of the 60th anniversary of Israel, has 105 signatories in total. For the sake of space, the letters editor has selected 21 of them to be named in the paper - 14 men and 7 women, see below:


BUT the paper has printed all 105 names in the online version here. And guess what: more than half of them (59) are women*.

So, evidence of a gender bias on the letters page? It certainly looks like it...


* I'm confident of this, because where the gender wasn't obvious from the name, I googled the person in question, and found all their genders.

Guardian, Tuesday 29th April 2008

Back to normal for today's tally:


...although once again women are given a greater share of voice on a gender-related issue: this time it's how employers should address maternity leave and childcare requirements.

Guardian, Monday 28th April 2008

Cor blimey, strike a light, for the first time since records began (although that was only the week before last, admittedly), there are more letters from women in today's Guardian than from men.

Feast your eyes on this rarity:


And what is it that's prompted the ladies to write to the Guardian in such numbers? Well, the ongoing argument about whether it's wrong that more money gets donated to donkey sanctuaries than to domestic violence charities, for one. But also the 10p tax band fiasco, which - unsurprisingly - seems to be riling up men and women equally, and funding for education, which may or may not be a 'women's issue'.

Good show, and I still think that this kind of thing indicates that women *do* write letters to the editor. But one swallow does not a summer make, and so forth, so we'll see what happens over the course of the rest of the week...

Observer, Sunday 27th April

After a good start for the Observer, not such a great showing this week:


And here are the topics:

Guardian, Week Total 21-26 April 2008

Bearing in mind that the gender split in the Guardian readership is 57% men and 43% women, let's have a look at the distribution of letters over the past week (Monday 21st to Saturday 26th April):


(Ind. = 'Indeterminate')

It's not looking representative, is it? Although we still don't know why...

Guardian, Saturday 26th April 2008

Sorry for the delay, I have been by the seaside watching small children roll a small rock down a big rock. Here's Saturday's tally:


And here are the topics: