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'?
