Today's chart...
Why am I recording the gender of people whose letters are published in the Guardian and the Observer? Find out here.
4 days ago
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In which I count how many letters to the editor published in the Guardian and the Observer are written by men, and how many by women. Here's why...
About Me
- patroclus
- Penryn, Cornwall, United Kingdom
- I'm the patron saint of blogging and the Poly Styrene of the blogosphere. I take my saintpunk responsibilities very seriously.
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5 comments:
This looks great, P. But here's a thought (that might well complicate things just that little bit too much, so feel free to ignore it); how many of the women represented in the letters page are writing about supposedly 'women's' issues (child care, wage inequality, domestic violence, etc)?
I remember that the teaching staff in my university department were overwhelmingly male. A few years after I left, I noticed that there had been a vast swathe of women coming in, which was great. However, I also saw that the majority of them listed 'women's literature' (or variants thereon) as one of their main research interests. Which was less great.
Hi Tim, yes, that's also a good question. On Friday, for example, of the three letters written by women, two were about whether or not we'd now achieved gender equality (they both said no, otherwise it would have been beauifully ironic), with the remaining lady commenting on Gordon Brown's image in the US.
I'm all for topics like pay inequality and domestic violence making it to the letters pages, but I do find it depressing when women are only called up (or only feel qualified?) to comment on so-called 'women's issues'.
I think part of it is due to the fact that they tend to choose letters from senior public figures to provide comment on current affairs, and there tend to be more men than women in senior positions.
I can't help wondering whether it is something to do with women having better things to do than engage in the inherent pointlessness of letters to the editor. I mean, when I think of a typical letter writer, it's either angry of Tunbridge Wells, or an unmarried man from Cricklewood with a small yet malodorous collection of anoraks who actually doesn't have anyone off or online to let off steam to, who would hate to actually engage in debate rather than getting his point and his point only across, and who thinks that getting his name in the newspaper makes him better than anyone else.
And I say this respectfully as someone who has had a letter published in the Standard and whose anorak (designer Italian it may be) is in bad need of dry cleaning.
Tim - I see what you're saying, but surely what is sad is not that women are interested in women's literature, but that men (and the university system that has been controlled by them) *aren't*
But then again this can raise some tricky problems, for example I think it is a shame if (and I assume this is the case) not many men write to newspapers about domestic violence/gender equality etc). But at the same time I find it uncomfortable when men are given an equal or greater voice than women in the abortion debate (I remember a recent abortion debate on the Today programme in which the interviewer and both contributers were male).
It seems quite hard to determine who is most 'qualified' to talk about what, and difficult to untangle this question from who is actually attempting to contribute to various discussions.
Well, I don't know GSE - that to me sounds like the same sort of argument that Mary Dejevsky used to justify her belief that women don't write blogs.
To me it seems that a lot of the letters in the Guardian are written by people in their professional capacity, to provide an expert perspective on something the newspaper has covered, or to correct an inaccuracy, or to publicise an issue or cause. I'm not sure that any of that is 'pointless'.
Incidentally, I bet that a good proportion of these 'professional' letters are actually ghostwritten by their organisation's PR department, and probably by a woman in the PR department, too, ho ho.
(I was going to trot out an anecdote about how I had letters published in the FT and the WSJ when I submitted them under my male colleague's name, but when I wrote to the Economist under my own name it didn't go in. But then I remembered I've had letters published in the Guardian under my own name, so that argument fell down, not that it held any weight anyway.)
Kate: Yes, it's the question of who's actually *attempting* to contribute that's the salient one here. Also, possibly the label 'women's literature' isn't best calculated to attract male readers. We don't hear about 'men's literature' - that's just 'literature', and, as far as I'm concerned, so should 'women's literature' be.
On a similar note, the other day I was hearing about how an all-female sketch show had been rejected by some TV channel or other because that 'idea' had been 'done before'. And yet you wouldn't see an all-male sketch show being rejected because we've already had the Fast Show, or Armstrong & Miller, or Monty Python.
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