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?
