The Week In Review

Notable O.E.P. Stories for the Week Ending in August 24th, 2012

Alex Prager, “Deborah”

Two of our reported successes this week deal with Missouri Representative/Senate candidate Todd Akin’s indefensible (though even this is contested), “folkloric” comments regarding the biological processes informing rape, pregnancy, and female physiology. The remaining two address similarly hot-button topics – men with eating disorders and the United States’ aging prison population, and just what to do with them – in a studied and cool manner that we’ve happily come to expect from our prolific alumni. All timely and utterly necessary appraisals of the various truths of our “now.”

	While a definite stigma persists as to the so-called truths and lived reality of eating disorders, a good portion of the conversation centers upon young girls and women – keeping with many medi- cal, psychoanalytic, and societal “tradi- tions,” it seems. Men have only recently been more fully conceptualized as hav- ing eating disorders; Abby Ellin‘s NYT article testifies on their behalf.
	In her own words: “Little Margaret found her voice this week.” Indeed, and it’s one of subtle irony and insight: PVF Fellow Margaret Martonosi writes candidly about MO Rep. Todd Akin, all the while maintaining a rhetorical/ideo- logical distance indicative of a thinker who’s spent time sitting with her mind, crafting her voice, and enacting close readings. She asks questions – how, why? – and is unafraid to highlight the hypocrisies of Akin’s social proclivities.
	“When Representative Todd Akin said that cases of ‘legitimate rape’ do not result in pregnancy,” muses Susan Celia Greenfield, “he was simply artic- ulating a widely-held medical belief. In second-century Rome that is.” This is an opinion worthy of PBS’s “Need to Know” designation and one, we might all agree, so deserving of attention.
	Can such a thing as “compassionate release” for aging prisoners exist? Perhaps the most notable aspect of Tina Maschi‘s HuffPo article persists as its understated ability to incite inquiry in readers (including myself), doing so by proffering points-of-view that some might consider inconsequential or even inflammatory. But what progress can be made without the willingness to talk, to question, to offer insight? We comm- end Tina for having the tenacity to approach, and critique, this subject.

Because I can’t seem to help myself, and in celebration of his one-hundred-and-ninth birthday this year, I’ll include an excerpt of a clipping from George Orwell’s 1946 essay “Why I Write” (found on Brain Pickings, one of those places online in which I easily and freely become lost, as if in a vortex of ideas). This is also another of those “But I promise you, it relates!”-type moments:

“And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane. I cannot say with certainty which of my motives are the strongest, but I know which of them deserve to be followed. And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a POLITICAL purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.” (emphasis mine)

- J. J. Morr

The Last Word

Hello Byline readers.  My name is Taryn, and I’m proud to be The OpEd Project’s newest intern.  At the risk of tainting your first impressions of me, I’d like to make an unseemly admission:  I love to read obituaries.  These condensed biographies of notable people, most of whom I’ve never heard of before, help me to take a few steps back and put my own life into perspective.

That is why I was surprised to come across a letter* to The New York Times’ obituary editor, Bill McDonald, in which he is asked why approximately one of every eight obituaries in The New York Times was about a woman.

Apparently, I’d become accustomed to seeing fewer women represented in newspapers, because I’d never even noticed the disparity.

In McDonald’s gauche response, he cited The New York Times’ “high standards” as the reason for the imbalance, explaining that to be published a person’ death “has to be news to a national and international readership.”  He went on to make the case that the cohort of women and minorities dying today did not have the same opportunities to make news that white men had.  That is undeniable, but it is also true that editors subjectively curate their columns.  As a case in point, a quick search led me to two recently departed women who lived up to the “high standards” of The New York Times, but who were overlooked by the obituary section nonetheless (bio links below).

Newspapers of record such as The New York Times shape our personal perceptions and our culture.  These omissions matter.  To fulfill this responsibility obituary editors might have to broaden their scopes to catch what preceding generations missed.  And so, we return to the wise words, “Whoever tells the story writes history.”

For a look at an innovative obituary, check out this New York Times video obituary of humorist Art Buchwald, which starts with “I’m Art Buchwald, and I just died.”

*“Readers Views: Equality Among the Dead,” The New York Times, September 12, 2010, pg. WK11.

Shirley Eskapa, controversial author.  The Telegraph, 8-22-11.

Debra Evenson, expert on Cuba, professor, author, lawyer, and activist.  Chicago Tribune, 8-28-11.

The byline survey begins again!

Hello readers, my name is Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux and I’m the new social media intern with the Op-Ed Project.  I’m a junior at Princeton University, majoring in religion and women & gender studies, where I run our campus feminist blog, Equal Writes, spend a lot of time riding my bike, and drink prodigious amounts of black tea.  I’m absolutely thrilled to be following in the illustrious footsteps of Chloe Angyal, who began the byline survey last August and ended, 3 months later, in October.  Ravenna Koenig, my fellow intern, did a mini-assessment of where women are in the world of op-eds since the beginning of 2010, and let me warn you – the stats are not good.  The percentage of most of the newspapers’ female contributors was hovering around 20%, which is abysmally low.

So I’ll be here for the next 3 months, tracking the bylines of seven major news outlets: the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the LA Times, Slate, Salon, and the Huffington Post.  I’ll also be looking at the op-ed pages of three college dailies, the Daily Princetonian, the Yale Daily News, and the Daily Texan, to see how women are represented in their college papers (these findings could have interesting implications if, as I suspect, more women are being published in college).

I’ll also be updating you periodically about just what the women who are published in the op-ed pages of these papers were writing about – are women, for example, writing frequently about foreign policy, hard sciences and economics?  I hope that you’ll respond to my findings in the comments, and add your own thoughts!

And, without further ado, the first week of the byline project 2.0:

Mainstream news outlets:

NYT   WaPo     WSJ     LA Times   HuffPo    Slate    Salon

% by women       23      41.2        17.6         15.4            24          32.4         0

% by men             77      58.8       82.4        84.6          76          67.6       100

Clearly, Salon has some catching up to do – they make the LA Times, at their pitiful 15%, look positively bursting with female voices.  This week was interesting because there were several op-eds about the need for gender-neutral Oscar categories (do you really think Sandra Bullock would have beaten Jeff Bridges in a unisex “best actor” category?  Okay, now tell me where you think the good roles are going in Hollywood).  The Washington Post, by contrast, was inching close to an even balance – we’ll see if they keep it up!

College newspapers

Daily Prince   Daily Texan   Yale Daily News

% by women               30                   50                    70

% by men                    70                    50                    10

Take a look at the Yale Daily News!  They run two op-eds a day, one by a staff columnist and one by a guest columnist, and there was never a day when there wasn’t a woman on the opinion page – there were even a few when both columnists were women!  I know it’s the first week, but Yale and UT are already making Princeton look pretty bad.

Ask a Mentor-Editor: Christine Kenneally

Christine Kenneally is a journalist and author who has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, Slate, and New Scientist, as well as other publications. Her book, The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language, was published in hardback by Viking in 2007. Before becoming a reporter, Christine received a Ph.D. in linguistics from Cambridge University and a B.A. (Honors) in English and Linguistics from Melbourne University. Christine was kind enough to answer the questions we’ve been asking of our Mentor Editors over the last few weeks. Her answers are, quite honestly, inspiring. Check them out:

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

I suspect there are at least two factors at work, though there may be more. First, it’s clear that women need to submit more. This is easier than it sounds (see the answer to the next question!). The other problem is surely that residual sexism constrains the choices of some editors, male or female. Maybe some day, a researcher will run an experiment or do a study that proves conclusively this is not the case. If that happens, I’ll be happy to change my mind. In the meantime, I know way too many women writers who have impressive expertise and writing skills, and who don’t get enough work. If they were invited to write op-eds, I know they would be fast, professional and produce stimulating pieces (and if any op-ed page editor would like a list of these names, I’d be delighted to put it together for them). I don’t know the solution to this problem, but—without suggesting that it is women’s job to change it–I am confident that it won’t change if more women don’t submit more op-ed pieces.

What can individual women do to change the situation?

It’s hard to write on spec–most of us don’t have spare time. It’s also hard to be rejected. When you put in a lot of work, it can feel like an entirely wasted effort if there is no publication at the end of that. The weird-good news about rejection that is that it doesn’t matter how successful you get, there is always some rejection–let me explain! Not every piece works for every editor, there are a million reasons why some articles don’t pan out. The more you realize this, the more it frees you to keep trying instead of becoming too discouraged or taking it too personally. One also learns that rejections can teach you to be a better writer. In addition, the more you go through that process, the more you learn to be discerning about what criticism you need to take and what criticism you can safely ignore. I’ve read it a million times, and I believe it to be an immutable law of physics–when it comes to publication, persistence is an essential ingredient.

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

Rest assured that–even if it doesn’t feel this way most of the time–the rest of us, writers, feminists, readers, look forward to hearing your voice. You won’t be told this often, if it all, you may never get a real sense of who is reading you, but if you do your research and you are willing to be edited, if you write with sincerity, and if you care about your subject, a lot of people will enjoy and even be changed by what you do. And always reach out for help, checking in with someone you know who has been through the same thing can save you a lot of time, as well as provide some ongoing reassurance. Take a class, do a seminar, start a group (commit to your op-ed groupies that you’ll all write a piece every two weeks!), and reach out online.

What’s an example of an argument that changed your life?

This example may seem a little trivial, but it did change my life. At the risk of revealing what a luddite I can sometimes be, I recall that when my husband wanted to get wifi in our house in our 2002 I thought it was an absurd and unnecessary expense. Still, he made a strong case for it. I don’t remember each point, but they added up to the conviction that it was at least worth trying. Of course, before you knew it, I was on the web in some fashion from ten different locations in the house. Wifi has changed the fundamental design of how we live. I am sometimes on the computer all day and I can’t imagine being tethered by a cable to just one spot.

Here comes the home stretch

Well folks, the Byline Survey is coming to a close. Every day for almost three months, I’ve been checking the op-ed pages of six different papers and counting how many women op-ed contributors there are on each day. The final numbers are almost in – there are two weeks still to go, but we already have ten weeks’ worth of data to look at. So let’s look at them.  Here are the raw numbers:

TOTAL	HuffPost	LA Times	NYT	Salon	WaPo	WSJ
Total op-eds	1479	100	82	76	72	136
Op-eds by women	301	30.33	17.75	7	10.5	8.75
%age	20.35	30.33	21.64	9.21	14.58	6.43

So, what’s going on here? Well, first of all, not one paper is at 50% women. No paper is even close. The LA Times comes the closest, but even there, less than 1/3 of the op-eds they publish are written by women. And, as you can see, the other papers trail the LA Times by almost 10%, if not more. By far the most disappointing is The Wall Street Journal, with only 6.43%, but Salon isn’t that far ahead of the WSJ.

It’s also interesting to note that being an online publication doesn’t necessarily mean more women – Salon’s 9.2% is more than doubled by HuffPo’s 20.3%. Sort of makes you question the theory that the online revolution has made media representation more democratic and equal, doesn’t it?
Stay tuned for more findings from the Byline Survey, including our final numbers for the entire three-month survey period.

Ask a Mentor-Editor: Maia Szalavitz

Maia Szalavitz is a journalist and author who covers neuroscience and the intersection between mind, brain and behavior.  She has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, Elle, Redbook, Time Magazine online, New Scientist, Reason, Mother Jones, O: the Oprah Magazine and other major publications and has appeared on Oprah, CNN, MSNBC and NPR. She is a Senior Fellow at Stats.org, a media watchdog organization. She is the co-author of The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog and Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist’s Notebook and author of Help at Any Cost: How the Troubled-Teen Industry Cons Parents and Hurts Kids. Maia is a former heroin and cocaine addict, and combines her experiences with her considerable expertise to write intelligently and with empathy about a range of addiction-related issues.

We asked Maia the questions we’ve been asking our Mentor Editors over the past few weeks, and she gave us some fascinating answers. Here’s what Maia had to say:

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

Maia Szalavitz: I think women tend to be more cautious than men in being sure that they are “right” and that their opinion is valid.

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

MS: Submit more op-eds!  Realize that if the only people who speak up are those who are certain, the points of view that are expressed will not benefit from the subtlety of argument that can come from those who are less sure of themselves and therefore, more likely to back up what they say with good evidence.

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

MS: Don’t worry about not being 100% sure– just jump in.

CA: What’s an example of an argument that changed your life?

MS: When I first tried to quit heroin, I was on methadone maintenance for a short period of time.  Because of prejudice about methadone, I thought that it didn’t really count as “recovery”– and because I personally kept using cocaine as well, I thought that it didn’t help anyone.  After I kicked drugs via a different method, I even wrote an op-ed for Newsday opposing methadone.  Then, I read the research and met people who really did benefit.  I learned then that an anecdote–even my own– is not evidence and that you need to be familiar with the research before you make arguments that can affect people’s lives.  Since then, I have done whatever I can to fight prejudice about methadone or other maintenance drugs that can help people recover.  But note that I was wrong and survived to publish again, too!

Week 9 wrap up

Last week was our ninth week of tracking bylines, which means that we’re nearing the end of our little experiment. Here’s a break down of the data for Week 9. I should warn you: it ain’t pretty.

	HuffPost	LA Times	NYT	Salon	WaPo	WSJ
% by women	22.6	25	4	0	12.5	8.3
% by men	77.4	75	96	100	87.5	91.7

As you can see, the New York Times and Salon had barely any women last week.

In fact, the only contributor to the Times op-ed page last week was one of four co-authors who contributed one column. Her name is Amy Unikewicz and she’s a graphic designer who co-authored a piece called “States of Conflict: An Update. It’s actually a chart, and it’s not the first one Unikewicz has co-contributed to the Times. It’s also a very useful at-a-glance break down of the state of the war in Iraq. Anyway, because I know it’s no fun to be the only woman standing in a room full of men, I just wanted to recognize Amy Unikewicz and to thank her for making this incredibly important data so accessible to Times readers.

Stay tuned for more data, and more interviews with our Mentor Editors!

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.

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: Maura Casey

Yesterday, we asked Mentor Editor and former New York Times editorial board member Maura Casey about why there are so few women – either contributors or columnists – on the nation’s most influential op-ed pages. Her answers were so interesting that we went back for more.

OEP: What is the culture like at The New York Times? Is its op-ed page, and the newspaper in general, a ‘woman friendly’ place? If so, why are there historically so few women columnists and front page bylines by women?

MC: I honestly can’t speak to the culture at the Mother Times. I can only say that I loved my tenure there. I can’t say what the culture was anywhere but the editorial board, which was wonderful, collegial, encouraging and very woman-friendly. I haven’t a clue about the bylines on the front page.

OEP: Did having Gail Collins as Managing Editor of the op-ed page make a difference? If so, how?

MC: I know that Gail Collins was frustrated by the lack of women’s voices on the oped page, and she had numerous meetings about it. If she couldn’t change it,  it makes me pessimistic about what editors can do. That’s why the ground-up approach of The Op Ed Project, while slow, will in the long run bear more fruit.

OEP: Why is it that the NYT’s two current female columnists – Collins and Dowd – seem to do mostly chatty essays, while the male columnists seem to do much more research, reporting, and definitely more international work?

MC: I can’t say why the columnists are different.They have different styles. Nick Kristof has always written on international issues for the Times and it is natural that he would continue that with a column.

Thank you so much, Maura, for your insights. We’ll be talking to more Mentor Editors soon. Are there any questions you want answered? Leave them in the comments, and we’ll pass them on to our Op-Ed Obi-Wans.