A San Francisco Alum on Her Op-Ed in The Boston Review

Tanya Maria Golash-Boza

A San Francisco public seminar alum, Tanya Maria Golash-Boza writes about her latest op-ed success in The Boston Review and the resulting responses.  She is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Merced. She is the author of: Yo Soy Negro Blackness in Peru, Immigration Nation: Raids, Detentions and Deportations in Post-9/11 America, and Due Process Denied: Detentions and Deportations in the United States.

I attended The OpEd Project workshop in San Francisco last November to learn strategies that would help me communicate my ideas to a broader audience. My goal was to publish an op-ed in a major media outlet – particularly The New York Times.  During the workshop, I learned all that and more. Since the workshop, however, I have realized that publishing op-eds can be less straightforward than I had imagined.

After The OpEd Project workshop, I worked with a mentor-editor, and sent an op-ed off to several major newspapers. I did not receive a single response. Thus, I sent that piece off to Racialicious and Counterpunch. Those alternative media outlets published versions of it.

Trying to publish an op-ed in a mainstream media outlet did not work that time. Ironically, I got my next op-ed published by not trying to publish one.

In January 2013, I wrote a report on mass deportations. It has several graphics and is a bit long for an op-ed. Thus, I posted it on my own blog, thinking people might find the data useful. Roberto Lovato, co-founder of Presente.org, saw the post and shared it with his connections in the media. The post generated interest among reporters and I had a phone interview with Elise Foley of the Huffington Post. She wrote a post about the report, and then Salon and Alternet picked it up.

An editor at the Boston Review saw the Salon article and contacted me to ask if I could write something for their next issue. My short piece came out in the March/April issue of the Boston Review

Since then, I have had radio and other newspaper interviews, and have published two Opinion pieces in Al Jazeera.

I will continue to work on my goal of getting an op-ed in the New York Times, but, for the time being, am happy knowing that, wherever I publish, there are myriad ways the information could be disseminated.

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.

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.

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.

Welcome to week four

Welcome to another week of counting bylines! We’re entering our fourth week of research, and some interesting patterns are starting to emerge. Based on the last three weeks, here are the percentage of male-penned op-eds in the papers we’re looking at:

HuffPost	LAT	NYT	Salon	WaPo	WSJ
63.33	58.33	82.55	81.2	86.67	95.9

We started this project with the knowledge that, in 2004, about 15% of op-eds were written by women. Based on data for the last three weeks – and keep in mind, we have almost two-and-a-half more months of research left – indicates that those numbers have changed very little. Five years on, the majority of the publications we’re looking at are over 80% male. The op-ed pages of The New York Times, Salon, The Washington Post and Wall Street Journal are all over 80% male.

Secondly, we were interested to see if online journalism is more likely to include women’s voices than print journalism is. Based on the numbers at The Huffington Post (63%) and at Salon (83%), it doesn’t seem that being an online publication is a guarantee of being a more gender-diverse publication. Of course, in order to make that conclusion with more certainty, you’d have to look at more than two online papers. But I hadn’t expected Salon’s numbers of women to be so low when compared to HuffPo.

Finally, it’s clear that since Susan Estrich spoke out about the lack of women on the LA Times’ op-ed page in 2004, there has been a vast improvement at that paper. Over the last three weeks, the LAT’s op-ed page has been, on average, 42% female, making it by far the best performer out of the papers we’re looking at.

Anyway, we’ll be tracking the numbers until the end of October, but for the next few weeks, I’m going to be looking in to what women write about when they’re published. Do they write primarily about “women’s issues”? Are there women being positioned as experts on national defense and fiscal policy? If not, why not? I’ll be talking to editors and experts about if and why women and men write about different things when they write op-eds.

It should be really exciting, so stay tuned!

Week 3 stats

Alright, party people -and I exclude myself from that group, seeing as I’m home on a Friday night compiling statistics – welcome to the end of week three.  Below are the numbers for the third week of the Byline Survey. And I know I promised you pretty, pretty graphs: they are coming. I promise. For now, here are the numbers in table form.

Paper	HuffPost	LA Times	NYT	Salon	WaPo	WSJ
%age Men	84	55	81.25	88	100	94
%age Women	16	45	18.75	22	0	6

As you can see, it’s been an unusual week on America’s major op-ed pages. As we mentioned (and celebrated) a few days ago, the WSJ ran an op-ed by a woman this week! Hurrah! And as we’ve come to expect, the LAT had an almost 50-50 week. It’s a breath of fresh air in an otherwise rather dismal set of numbers.

WaPo’s numbers are not what we’ve come to expect from the paper – from the WSJ, sure, but not WaPo! – but I think they can be easily explained. Following the death of Senator Ted Kennedy on Tuesday, WaPo , for some reason, published almost no contributors in the latter half of the week. So take that 100% with a grain of salt. Also – we’ll miss you, Teddy.

HuffPo was full of tributes to Kennedy, most of which, as you can see, where written by men. That said, HuffPo managed to salvage what was looking like a less-than-stellar week; after two days of barely breaking 10%, they managed to bring it up to a total of 16% of the week. Which is not far behind the NYT, but which is also below their usual standards.

So that’s it for week three, an unusual week in many ways. Have a lovely weekend, and see you next week!

Too good to last

Yesterday was an unusually good day for women on the op-ed pages. Especially at The Los Angeles Times, where all three op-ed contributors were women.

Sadly, yesterday’s apparent progress was too good to last. A day on which 100% of a mainstream paper’s op-ed contributors were women doesn’t seem to mark an aberration, but rather a trend: today, we’re back to the status quo, with almost no women on the nation’s op-ed pages. There are, in fact, no women to be found in any print papers. That’s no women at the NYT, LAT, WaPo or WSJ. It looks as though yesterday was a one-off, albeit a very exciting one. Salon’s op-ed page is 50% women today, though, with Rachel Maddow and Margaret Winter teaming up to write about prison HIV policies.

That said, the week is still young. Perhaps we’ll get another 100% day some say soon. I’m looking at you, Wednesday.