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.
7 comments:
Shouldn't you be getting on building your nest?
No, you can't discuss obscure records. According to the controller of 6 Music (a woman, apparently), males deal with music "intellectually"; women are "emotional".
Every time I feel an 80's-style pang of guilt for being male, a woman pops up and says something more demeaning than I could ever dream of.
woo! I can do comments again!
Dave: I am feathering the nest with pages torn from from the Economist and Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy.
Tim: Woo! Apparently your man Simon Reynolds had a phase of engaging with music emotionally, although he did seem to want to somehow 'justify' it by invoking Barthes et al. In reality I've no doubt it's perfectly possible for both sexes to engage with things intellectually *and* emotionally. We're more similar than we are different.
What gets my goat particularly is when women in the media (a more intellectual profession than many) spout on about how women in general (themselves excluded, presumably) aren't intellectually-inclined, always with the implication that we shouldn't aspire to be, because it's weird, or pathetic or anoraky, or just not 'our' place. It's the inverse of men being led to believe it's not 'right' for them to feel emotional about things.
The older I get, the more annoyed I get by this. I naively used to think that feminism had achieved its aims, but then I realised that that was just how I was brought up - i.e. to believe that my gender is utterly irrelevant to anything I might want to do, say, think or achieve, intellectually speaking. My own intellectual capacity - or lack of - is another matter, of course...
'males deal with music "intellectually"; women are "emotional".'
Oh fuck me sideways. This is like when in sexual education lessons during RE at school (yeah, I know that's daft) we were told that men like sex and women like emotion.
Are women in positions of power all like pull-up-th-drawbridge presbyterians?
Reading The Times today and seeing two letters from SW14 and one form SW12 I am more convinced than ever there is a Phd here for someone. How is the media reflecting the world. You could break it down by circulation reach, postcode, diversty in pictures..
Okay. Maybe a GCSE coursework project, then.
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