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The Lack of Women's Voices in the Media Susan Estrich Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, responded to the news that his magazine assigns stories to men nearly three times as often as it does to women, without a hint of apology. "We don't assign stories based on gender, but now that Ruth Davis Konigsberg has helpfully shown us the error of our ways, henceforth all assignments will be equally balanced between the sexes." Ruth Davis Konigsberg is an editor at Glamour Magazine who noticed – anyone paying attention would – that men's bylines routinely outnumber women's in general interest magazines, and started to do what I've been doing for years. She counted. And what she found – not only at Vanity Fair, but also at The Atlantic, at The New York Times Magazine, at Harper's and at The New Yorker – was that men outnumbered women by anywhere from three to one to five to one, which is just about what your typical newspaper opinion page looks like, although not nearly as one-sided as the Sunday morning shows. For the record, Davis Konigsberg said she had no interest in starting a fight. "I'm interested in starting a conversation," she said. "I don't think I'm going to be the chronicler of gender issues in journalism." (But see www.womenTK.com)
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The conversation has a long way to go. My students and I started counting the number of women on op-ed pages five years ago, and we didn't want to start a fight, either. We just wanted to see change. We're still waiting for those changes. Meanwhile, Tuesday's New York Times includes the usual roster of three men and no women. The Sunday morning shows are even worse. The first "Who's Talking" report from the White House Project was released in 2001 and found that men outnumbered women nine to one on these agenda-setting shows. In the 2002 follow-up, it found that there was little improvement. In the 2005 study, called "Who's Talking Now," it found more than half of Sunday morning news shows did NOT include a single woman. Someone else needs to count talk radio. My own informal survey, based on a recent book tour, suggests that the ratio of male to female hosts is roughly the same as the Sunday morning shows. After three weeks on the road, I gave up counting after my 50th male host, compared to all of three women in major markets. While the rest of us were busy counting how few women found their way to print or television, this week also saw the publication of a new book by the only woman to inhabit the valuable real estate of a New York Times column. "Are Men Necessary?" by Maureen Dowd debuted to generally negative reviews (a "book length mistake," according to the Los Angeles Times), although The New York Times Magazine (103 to 36, by Konigsberg's count) did run a lengthy excerpt accompanied by a positively frightening picture of the author as vixen. With friends like these ... Certainly, the question Dowd asks is one that she is among the few women in America with the luxury to ponder.
The question for everyone else is the opposite: Are women necessary? Every one of the magazines counted by Konigsberg is edited by a man. Most editorial pages are edited by men – even in the exceptional case, the publisher is a man. Women certainly are necessary to the circulation of general interest magazines and newspapers, and to their advertisers. Take a look at all those cosmetic ads that crowd the front pages. How many men do you run into looking for the latest Lancome bonus, shopping the white sales, perusing designer dresses? How long would Graydon Carter's Vanity Fair survive if any significant percentage of women decided NOT to read his magazine in the same numbers as he doesn't publish them?
Imagine women giving up on The New York Times or Vanity Fair or the Sunday morning shows the way those institutions have given up on them. Conversations are fine. But what if no one can hear your voice because all the microphones and printing presses are in someone else's hands? At some point, women may have to stop waiting for men to respond and start using their wallets as weapons. Ultimately, money talks. And that is one thing women do have.
COPYRIGHT 2005 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC.
Editor's note:
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