Gender Gap: My take on the Vida Count and a couple of the responses. (Part One)

I think I live in a generational borderland.

Above me are the Gender Warriors, ready to do battle with men and society in order to break down the barriers of patriarchy, male privilege, pay inequality and the host of other things that make up that good old “glass ceiling.”

Below me, are the Gender Peacemakers, who look out at our economic landscape, at each other, and at the Gender Warriors and don’t see Patriarchy as some towering monolith. What they see is that more of their female cohorts are going to college than their male cohorts, they see a landscape where women now make up the majority of the workforce and where men are more chronically unemployed than women.

I live in a generation that is a mix of the two, that’s why I say I live in a generational borderland. In my twenty plus years in the workforce, I’ve had more women managers than men. I’ve had more women teachers than men teachers. I’ve worked side-by-side with more women than men. - And yet two of my oldest male friends both support multiple kids and stay-at-home wives. So, when VIDA comes out with its annual count of women in publishing, and writers like Becky Tuch, and Laura Miller come out with their testimonial articles attempting to confirm the validity of the numbers with anecdotal sincerity, telling my how my male cohorts are so chauvinistic and patriarchal that they don’t “listen” to women, I get a bit frustrated - more so with the likes of Ms. Tuch than Ms Miller, so I’ll start with Ms. Tuch.

First, I can’t argue with the numbers. Men do get published more often than women in the magazines referenced by VIDA. But the idea that it is the result of a gender bias, of discriminatory, sexist publishers who try to reduce an accomplished woman editor and writer to a reference guide for a potential panty raid is near sighted and disrespectful of the majority of editors who do nothing of the sort. Ms. Tuch doesn’t like the answer that women just need to submit more. She takes a Gender Warrior stance that I don’t think applies as neatly now as it may have once applied twenty, thirty or forty years ago (especially among the budding granny memoir set). It is an easy, pat, and ultimately incorrect assumption to cast women as the victims of an oppressive, monolithic Patriarchal editorial system that seeks to repress women writer’s voices.

The monolithic patriarchy doesn’t exist anymore. Sure, there’s still a Patriarchy, but for people younger than I am, “the patriarchy” is old, tired, and like the Baby Boomers, ready to shuffle off into retirement - even if it still squeals and kicks and screams from time to time. Despite a residual “male privilege” women have more advantages and choices than men do these days.

The notion presented by the women editors mentioned in Ms. Tuch’s article that women just need to submit more is probably an accurate one, but I don’t think anyone is digging deep enough to explain why and so it’s being left out there as a kind of argumentative McGuffin. The Gender Warrior takes that comment about women needing to submit more and, like Becky Tuch does, fires back that women aren’t submitting more because the social deck is stacked against them. She seems to be arguing that if only there weren’t poor single mothers, or if only a working woman’s Alpha male, type-A personality chauvinistic husband would do a little more house work then, by god, there’d be a veritable Renaissance of women’s literature.

I think the problem is deeper but less insidious than Ms Tuch, and VIDA, thinks. Of course women are writers too, but are all of them submitters?

Stick with me here, it might be a long walk.

We can trot out anecdotes and so on, women confronted with pig-ish male editors, and we can trot out anecdotes about publishers that make an effort to balance their lists, but no one ever wins a “war of anecdotes” because someone always knows someone who has a story that can counter any anecdote that someone else knows. So, let’s try to focus on this two part question: First, how many of the women who got published in those magazines are trying to be the primary breadwinners for themselves and their families by working as full-time writers? How many of the men? Second, how many of the men who got published in those magazines are being supported by a more economically successful wife (a lawyer, a doctor, a small business owner)? How many of the women are supported by high earning husbands?

I don’t know the answers to those questions, but I’m willing to go out on a limb and say there are more male writers trying to be the primary breadwinners for themselves and their families by writing than there are women trying to do the same thing. In other words, my argument is this: Men get published more because they submit more and they submit more because men are still judged by what they do and how much they earn from doing it - and writing is no exception. Despite the dying patriarchy, we still live in a society where it is more acceptable for a woman to be supported, in part or in whole, by her husband while men are still expected, as a gender, to work outside the home. Those men who play stay-at-home-dad are not as rare now as they were when the movie Mr. Mom came out, but they are still a distinctly microscopic minority compared to the number of traditional, stay-at-home moms (We can get into why stay at home dad status is still generally unappealing later).

Ms Tuch hints at this when she quotes John Berger on how men’s and women’s social worth is determined, and she has the beginning of a point here. Yes, men are socialized to do and women and are socialized to be. She rightfully acknowledges that this is a drawback for women, but she doesn’t seem to go deep enough to satisfy me. She doesn’t seem to acknowledge how this dynamic might also damage men. What’s also odd, is that she trots out this Berger quote, but it seems completely disconnected from her own earlier realization that society and women themselves put a lot of pressure on themselves to “DO” a lot of things in order to “BE” a women - women spread themselves thin and run themselves ragged trying to be good mothers, good wives, good lovers, good employees, good bosses, and good writers. This is the social hangover from Peggy Lee and Enjoli feminism, and man, seriously, it sucks for women.











Ever since I was an undergrad I’ve been hearing how much better women are at multitasking, but after listening to Peggy Lee and Becky Tuch go on about everything a woman does, and has to do in order to be - I’d like to voice my support for male monotasking, even if it does mean we end up sacrificing family, relationships, and clean clothes on the alter of writing and publication. My response to Ms. Tuch, if indeed her argument is that women have too many expectations placed upon them to also be expected to submit as frequently as men, is to say give up something. Resist the social demand to have-be-do everything, and focus on writing and publishing. Writers are supposed to be good at living outside the demands of society.

Here are some statistics I’d like to see come out of VIDA to give a more detailed and accurate picture of this gender gap in publishing:

1) The number of male writers freelancing to support a family vs. the number of female writers freelancing to support a family.

2) The number of single, unmarried, childless male writers supporting themselves by freelancing vs. the number of single, unmarried, childless female writers supporting themselves by freelancing.

3) The number of single parent writers by gender (we can get into the “why” of single parenthood, especially for women, at another time).

4) The number of male vs. female writers who have full time day jobs not associated with their writing and how many are married and unmarried.

5) The number of writing couples and which one submits more, and which one is more widely read.

6) The number of male writers financially supported by high earning wives, vs the number of female writers financially supported by high earning husbands - and how frequently do the supported male writers submit their work compared to how frequently the female writers submit their work.

7) What is the average age of women writers who submit most frequently, and what is the average age of their children - if they have any?

Here’s my hypothesis (if someone with a research budget would like to take it up): I suspect the imbalances might happen most in areas associated with question 1 and 6 with men dominating in question 1 while women dominate in question 6. I suspect that parity will appear among single writers, with a slight increase in the number of single mother writers (questions 2 & 3 & 4). Question number 5 will be the most interesting, and I have no idea how it’ll turn out. And, to return to question six, I’ll bet the male writers, even balancing kids on one knee and sweeping the floor with the other, will submit more. Question 7 indirectly gets at the underlying issue in question 3. I think that older women with older children will be submitting as frequently as men of all ages because, damn it all to hell, we can’t get around the narrow biological window where women can give birth without serious problems.

Again, that comes down to sacrifice, to monotasking. I’m 40, and I am still putting off starting a family in order to pursue writing. If I were a woman, I’d be in the potential Down Syndrome baby phase of my child bearing years and unlikely to have kids of my own. How many women writers are willing to make that sacrifice? How many are angry at me right now for telling them they have to make the choice? How many want to tell me that men are lucky they get to father children until they’re seventy and CAN put off making the decision.

Not many. A lot. All of them.

Essentially, what I’m getting at here is that, if Ms Tuch is right and there are too many expectations on women and it’s because of those expectations that women aren’t getting published and not submitting enough then the problem boils down to the thing that always plagues women - their vaunted multitasking ability. It’s become this shibboleth of womanhood in America that they can do six things at once, and yes, it saps women’s energy and health. It sucks to run around trying to juggle 6 different things, and to assume that everyone around them will fall apart if this one juggling woman doesn’t do everything all these other people expect of her. Part of this feeling women have comes from being told they aren’t a “woman” if they don’t work, breed, fuck, and bake with equal skill and passion. Another part of it come from society embracing the pissy, reverse-sexist idea that men are somehow these high earning, economic powerhouses who act like cultural gatekeepers closing out women, but at the same time are so domestically incompetent they can’t boil water or wash their whites separately from their darks.

Women writers, I’m going to give you a bit of advice - be a little selfish with your writing. If writing, being a mom, a wife, a lover, an active church member or socialite are all equally important to you and therefore deserve equal attention, well, men are going to continue to get published more often than you because men, for better or worse refuse to spread myself around as thinly as women. I have left girlfriends, cut off family, and generally acted like a baby when my already squeezed and narrow writing time has been encroached upon. Writing is important enough to me that I’m a never married, childless man of 40 with a girlfriend ten years younger than I am who makes about 5K more a year than I do - and I’m the one who washes the dishes and cleans the house, plus I do my own laundry (white and darks separate).

Now if it turns out that women are submitting on par with men, then maybe there is something to Ms Miller’s argument that men don’t listen to or care about women’s voices.  But even that has some caveats.  That will be the next post.