Keeping Count of Women
Where do you keep track of women's representation?
Remember to send in anything you’d like included in the Classifieds post I’m running on Thursday. Job postings, reading recommendations, requests for pen-pals—if you think the person you’re looking for is on this listserv, send it in.
And also on Thursday, join me, Ross Douthat, Anna Louie Sussman, and Sarah Williams at Plough’s launch event discussing “The Case for One More Child.” I’ve kept notes on your questions to inform my own remarks.
My former FiveThirtyEight colleague, Ben Casselman (now at the NYT) has kept a running tally of who he quotes in his articles.
This is the second year he’s done this sort of reckoning, and I really appreciate it. There are more details in his thread, and you can also check out his stats from last year (44 percent of experts were women, 40 percent of regular people were women).
One thing I’ve noticed in my own journalism work is that I’m least likely to cite women when I’m working outside my areas of expertise. If I’m new to a topic, and googling around to find experts, I find whom everyone else is citing—and that tends to be men.
Keeping track of who I’m interviewing, whether for a whole year or a single article, helps me lift up women’s voices, but it also makes me double check I’m really doing the work to go beneath the surface. Am I adding anything with my article if I’m citing the same three people as everyone else on this topic?
Outside of my writing, I still find myself counting women:
On the cover bylines of magazines I subscribe to
In the speakers lists for conferences I attend (or speak at)
When I make my list of guests for my Tiny Book Club or for programming in my day job
When I choose art for the top of these posts
That last is the most challenging—I usually want to pick art that shows women and is by women, but my tools for search make it easier to do the former than the latter. I’ve appreciated your suggestions, but it’s a bit frustrating I have no easy way to sort my image results by who made them.
I want to make new discoveries. To that end, I’ve started following #WomensArt, a twitter feed curated by freelance writer and art historian @PL_Henderson1. And I reach out to some of the Binders Full of Women facebook groups for further recommendations.
Where do you find yourself keeping count of women in your life?
Have you made any changes or reached out to groups based on what you found? I sent an email this week to a friend who works for a publication hosting a conference on “The Future of [Redacted]” that, judging by the speakers list, figured that women had no part to play in [Redacted]’s future.
Where do you wish you had better tools or resources to find women?
I’m grateful for the work done by Leticia Ochoa Adams in putting together Catholic Speakers of Color, so that folks can broaden their programming. (I know lots of folks crib from other parishes’ programs—because they’ve told me that’s how they found me! That makes it hard for new people to break in). I’d like more filters to help me find women, read them, and recommend them.
Please share your recommendations for where you find women to lift up, and when you keep count yourself, and I’ll share highlights from your discussion next Thursday.
How interesting. I rarely do the sort of accounting you describe, and I think that is because I've always been drawn to women-dominant spaces professionally: women's magazines, a doctoral program in Victorian literature (with a woman--and a mother--for my dissertation advisor), now high school English teaching and romance novel writing. It is true, however, that in many of these spaces male voices take on outsize authority or importance when they do appear. I've also been pondering the narrative of the Brilliant, Iconoclastic Teacher Who Changed My Life and how he's almost always a dude, while the types for good women teachers are either Cranky Witch Who Nonetheless Taught Me Grammar or Lady I Wish Were My Mom.
Very interesting topic and discussion. Thanks Leah!
I don't document my counts but I count constantly. I count conference line-ups, panel discussions, book award lists, award list winners, short lists that people of folks they recommend others follow on Twitter, podcast guests, sources quoted in articles (and if they're interviewed as anecotes v. experts) and so on and so forth. (I also note when they're spouses of another speaker.) Truthfully, though, I give very little credit to seeing women's names if they're all white women. Because white women often run in the same social circles as white men, I don't actually give too much credit to places that may achieve gender equity but are still overwhelmingly white. Inviting WOC and ensuring they're not tokenized takes real work but it also shows me how much institutions truly care and aren't just trying to do the least/give lip service.