Where are the women on Wikipedia?

I’m a little late on this, but according to a new study reported in The Wall Street Journal, only 13% of Wikipedia contributors are women. It is fascinating to watch another form of media – a very influential one, whether we like it or not – with its rate of women’s participation hovering between 13% and 17%. As we at The Op-Ed Project have observed, this range is where most forms of media are at:

15% of op-eds are written by women, 15% of radio and TV producers are women,  16% of guests on Sunday morning political talk shows are women and 17% of Congress is female.

What is it about this range? How do we get out of it? And how do we change the fact that The Wall Street Journal’s op-ed page is even less than 13%?

Ask a Mentor-Editor: Kate Heartfield

Kate Heartfield is a weekly columnist and a blogger for The Ottawa Citizen, and has been a member of that paper’s editorial board since 2005. Her columns, especially those that focus on social justice and poverty, are highly regarded, and in 2007, Heartfield was awarded the RESULTS Canada Media Award. She is also one of The Op-Ed Project’s Mentor Editors, and volunteers her considerable expertise in helping our workshop attendees edit and pitch their columns to papers (and as if you needed more convincing, her sunglasses make it pretty clear that she’s downright cool).

We posed to Kate the same three core questions we’ve been posing to our Mentor Editors over the past few weeks, and her responses were insightful and, most importantly, practical.

Chloe Angyal: Why do you think there are so few women on the op-ed pages?

Kate Heartfield: The main problem is that not enough women are submitting. It might be that women’s participation in public discourse is still novel enough that women don’t have the intergenerational mentorship support and the sense of entitlement that men have, and perhaps are still coming to grips with the idea that they can be opinion-shapers. I don’t know the whole answer. I do know that once an op-ed writer of either gender submits a few interesting, timely, well-written and proof-read pieces, within the desired word count — that writer will go on the editor’s list of reliable writers and might start getting commissions. That’s especially true if said writer takes editing well and can work to a deadline.

CA: What can individual women do to change the situation?

KH: Write! Submit! Repeat! Rejection happens for all kinds of reasons, and often it just means the editor has no space left on the page that week. If you don’t succeed the first time, don’t give up. Try again a couple of weeks later with a new piece of writing. Don’t pester the editor about pieces that have already been rejected, though. It is fair to let an editor know that if you don’t hear back within a certain period — say, a week, but it depends on the time-sensitivity of the topic — you will submit it to another paper.

CA: What advice would you give to a young feminist hoping to break into public debate?

KH: Learn the craft of op-ed writing. Newspapers will only give you space if you earn it. That means familiarizing yourself with writing for a mass audience. It means learning to write clear sentences, and learning to self-edit. It means developing a clear thesis that has some connection to the news of the day. Mentor-editors are here to help with all that. There’s a small book called The Elements of Style by Strunk and White that’s indispensable for anyone wanting to write for newspapers.

So what are you waiting for, brilliant women of the world? Take Kate’s advice: pick up a pen and start writing to change the world. If you want to learn how to do that The Op-Ed Project way, sign up for one of our upcoming sessions. In the next few months alone, we’ll be in New York, Boston, San Francisco and Cleveland!

Ask a Mentor-Editor: Joe Loya

OEP Mentor Editor Joe Loya is an author, essayist, playwright, and contributing editor at the Pacific News Service. His op-eds on politics, religion, criminal justice issues, and other cultural events have appeared in national newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Newsday, and the San Francisco Chronicle (two of which, regular readers of this blogs will know, are being monitored in our Byline Survey).

I asked Joe a few of the questions we’ve been asking our other Mentor Editors, in an attempt to better understand the low numbers of women on America’s op-ed pages.

Chloe: Why do you think there are so few women on the op-ed pages?

Joe Loya: One major reason for so few women on the op-ed pages, I believe, is that a very low percentage of op-ed submissions to newspapers come from women, plain and simple (10% at one major newspaper.) The myriad reasons why women don’t submit are not so plain and simple, but the math is.

CA: In your work with traditionally under-represented groups, what has been your greatest obstacle to making their voices heard?

JL: The greatest obstacle I confront when I work with folks from traditionally under-represented groups is convincing them that their perspective would be a valuable contribution to public debate. I have to convince them that they need not have attended some fancy college or taken a ton of writing classes to get published on the op-ed page.

CA: What advice would you give to a young feminist hoping to break into public debate?

JL: Find a writing mentor who will both encourage you and provide practical writing editing advice for your work. Someone who will guide you toward publications that would best showcase your skill and voice. Someone already active in the arena of public debate.

What questions would you ask of a Mentor Editor if you had the chance? Leave them in the comments, and I’ll be sure to ask next time!

Way to go, WaPo!

Congrats to The Washington Post for an all-woman op-ed page today! It’s a nice change from last week, which was a 100% woman-free week for the paper.

Today’s WaPo op-ed contributor Jeanne McManus writes about the breakdown in public civility, and the breakdown in our ability to talk about anything else. Next to her piece is  one by Peggy Venable, who writes about tort reform in Texas. McManus is a former editor of the Post, and Venable is the Texas Director of Americans for Prosperity. Both are credible experts who write well on issues about which they are passionate.

It’s really refreshing to see an op-ed page where women are represented. Let’s hope WaPo can keep it up!

Headdesk Wednesday

Today, Wednesday September 16th, there were no women on the op-ed pages of the following papers:

The Los AngelesTimes

The New York Times

Salon

The Washington Post

The Wall Street Journal.

There were some women on the front page of The Huffington Post. Two of them. Out of thirty-one. That’s 6.5%.

Headdesk.

Wrapping up Week 5, and welcome to Week 6

Welcome to week six of tracking the bylines on America’s most influential op-ed pages. As regular readers know, I’ve spent the last five weeks counting how many women-penned op-eds are published each day in The Huffington Post, The LA Times, The New York Times, Salon, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal.

The findings have been fascinating, and have really driven home the need for the kind of work we do at The Op-Ed Project. It’s clear that, with the percentage of women on the op-ed pages hovering anywhere between 5% and 25%, depending on the paper, we’ve still got a lot of work to do before women are equally and equitably represented on America’s op-ed pages. The Op-Ed Project aims to inject women’s voices into public debate by teaching women how to write and pitch op-eds, creating an opportunity for individual women and individual editors to work together to change the byline imbalance. Last week reflected the varying levels of women’s representation on the op-ed pages. As you can see below, some papers are doing well, and some are doing… less than well.

	HuffPost	LA Times	NYT	Salon	WaPo	WSJ
% Op-eds by men	78	50	64	100	100	90
% Op-eds by women	22	50	36	0	0	10

So here we are, at the start of the sixth week of tracking bylines. This week, in addition to counting the number of female voices on the op-ed pages, I’ll be talking to some of The Op-Ed Project’s Mentor Editors about the op-ed gender gap, and what we can do about it.

Hold on to your hats

Hold on to your hats, people. Hold on to your hats and make sure you’re sitting down, because today, the Wall Street Journal’s op-ed page is 30% women. Yes, you read that right: 30%.

To put this in context, the last time the Journal ran a woman-penned op-ed was last Monday, and it was co-written by a woman. Their last op-ed written entirely by a woman was on August 20th. Today, the Journal ran four op-eds in total, one by a woman, and another co-written by a woman. This is a big deal. That puts the Journal ahead of the Huffington Post, at least for today (HuffPost’s front page was 24% women). It puts the Journal ahead of NYT, WaPo and Salon, for Pete’s sake!

Perhaps someone at the Journal is reading the Byline Blog…

What do women write about?

As I mentioned at the end of last week, there weren’t that many women on the op-ed pages last week. But I thought it would be interesting to take a look at what the few women who were published chose to write about.

First up, we had Rivka Carmi, President of Israel’s Ben-Gurion University, published in The LA Times. Carmi was writing in response to an op-ed, published last week, by a BGU professor by the name of Neve Gordon, in which Gordon advocated a global boycott of Israel.

Carmi, in a bold move, described Gordon as having “used his pulpit as a university faculty member to advocate a personal opinion, which is really demagoguery cloaked in academic theory.” It was an impressive and unequivocal stance to take, though of course, she was also trying to explain why she has chosen not to boycot Gordon by firing him (it’s illegal, that’s why).

Next, also in the LAT, there was a column by Korean-American Laura Ling and Euna Lee, in which they expressed regret at their entrance into North Korea and gratitude for their rescues. More important than both of those, they insist, is the story they went to the border to cover: human trafficking of North Korean migrants who work, in secret, in China. It’s gripping stuff.

Finally, Jean Edward Smith, writing in The New York Times, discussed FDR’s leadership and economic policy, and what we (and our current President) can learn from them.

So, we have a woman writing about Middle East policy, two more writing on human rights and another writing about fiscal policy and economic leadership. Those are hardly traditionally “feminine” issues, are they? This week, again, we’ll be watching closely to see not just how many women are writing, but what they’re writing about. While the number of women on the op-ed pages is important, it’s also crucial that women don’t get marginalized by topic, so that they’re only acknowledged as experts on certain issues – women’s issues. Carmi, Ling, Lee and Smith have demonstrated that women can be credible experts on a range of issues. Here’s hoping that this week gives us more proof of that.

Ask a Mentor Editor: Michael Kimmel

Michael Kimmel, one of the OEP’s newest Mentor Editors, is a Professor of Sociology at SUNY Stonybrook, and the author of more books than some people have read in their life. His most recent book, Guyland, is about masculinity in America – on which Kimmel is an expert -  and focuses specifically on young men between the ages of 15 and 25. Recently, Kimmel has begun writing columns for The Huffington Post.  Last week, he answered some of our burning questions about the op-ed gender gap:

Chloe: Why do you think there are fewer women on the op-ed pages than men?

Michael Kimmel: My answer’s going to sound sort of ironic. Feminist women are kind of in a contradictory position, because on the one hand, women assert that there’s no difference between women and men, that women can do anything men can do. Therefore, since women and men are so similar, why do you need to put women on the page? Editors can almost use equality feminism against women. We don’t have to hire a female surgeon to get a feminist perspective on surgery. So since women and men are so similar, we hire the best qualified. That’s what they would say. And the best qualified are the ones with the best history, so in this sense, seniority and tenure, all those sorts of things, which we know are gendered, come back to haunt women.

CA: Do you think there are really editors out there who would justify their 80-20 breakdown like that?

MK: No, that’s what I, as a sociologist, would say. What the editors would say is that they are definitely looking for the distinctive voices of women or minorities. And what my belief is that women and minorities are seen as niche groups. So you have one, and you check it off. It’s like The New York Times. They have Bob Herbert: Check. They have two women: Check. And then outside those niches they have economics, politics, global affairs, and those turn out to be – what a surprise! – white men.

So what happens is, women are a topic to be covered, so when you have one, you basically cover your base. And that’s how I do think they see it. Women are a niche market, a particular topic. And you can’t have a man cover that. So you get a woman, and if you’ve covered it demographically, and you’ve covered it substantively.

So the argument that I just made (and this is the sociologist speaking again) is a difference feminism argument. Yes, women have a different voice, women have different sensibilities, women have a different perspective, OK, so we’ll cover women. We’ll have our girl, she’ll cover girls, that’s solved. And in a funny way, difference feminism ends up segregating women into a kind of ghetto, which has been the argument against difference feminism all these years. But equality feminism also ends up hurting women because then you’re just looking at the blank, de-gendered resume, and you have one person who’s had all these great previous appointments and the other person who’s had less, and you say, “we’ll take the best.” And the one who looks like the best looks that way because of institutional discrimination, which gets buried in the credentialing, and you always end up with the white man. So whether you use a similarity or a difference model, either way, women lose.

Final numbers for weak, er, week 4

Happy Labor Day, everyone! I hope you’re enjoying your long weekend, and the fact that the every block in the entire city of New York smells like barbeque.

It wasn’t a great week on the nation’s op-ed pages this week. Neither Salon nor the Washington Post had a single woman columnist all week, and even the usually equitable LA Times can in at a dismal 22% women. After that kind of week, I think we all deserve a holiday.

That said, as you can see from the table below, the New York Times had rather a good week; in fact, they had more women contributors this week than they have since we started tracking bylines a month ago, so kudos to the NYT.

Paper	HuffPost	LA Times	NYT	Salon	WaPo	WSJ
%age women	24	22	28	0	0	4

Next week, I’ll be writing more about what women write about when they do write, something I aimed to do this week, but with so few women-penned columns to discuss, the task was rather difficult. Let’s hope that next week provides us with more to talk about!

Happy Labor Day, and for those of you who are barbequing, remember that while humans are carbon-based lifeforms, there is no reason for everything you grill to be black.