I bring this up because we just found a link to a blog post from the World's Fair in which the author takes a break from his academic pursuits to examine the male-female breakdown of Shouts and Murmurs authors. (The post is arguably more amusing than most S&M columns.) His conclusion: "Out of the 133 authors of features under the Shouts and Murmurs banner (in the modern, post-1992 era), 17 have been women. That's 12.782%." To put it another way, men are represented in the section at a rate 8 times that of women.
What's more, there has not been a woman author of Shouts and Murmurs for over three years. The last one was in 2004.
The rest is over at Salon (get a free pass to the site for watching a short ad), as well as the original source, The World's Fair. As an MFA student, I have to say I'm amazed. Our program is majority female. Most of the writers I've met are female. But then again, I have never been to New York, the city for which, we assume, the New Yorker was named. Perhaps New York is different. Perhaps in the borders of New York are somehow toxic to women and their carefully mailed submissions to Shouts and Murmurs. Salon's writer has an excellent point, that being the gigantic number of patently desperate writers flinging their submissions (in utter futility) toward the New Yorker on a regular basis, agent or no. It is impossible to believe that the ratio of submissions or inquiries is anywhere close to only 13% female.
Heh. That's sort of cute. For a moment I made it sound like they actually read submissions.
Time for a photo...at least in Minnesota I see evidence of women with books. This statue has been at the Minnesota State Fair since the 1950's, and is an homage to the women of the state.
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