Monday, January 23, 2012

Novelists and gaps...

I am confused as I found this via Feministing. Here is the piece:

According to Slate's blog Double X, "Over about two years, from June 29, 2008 to August 27, 2010, the Times reviewed 545 works of fiction—338, or 62 percent, were by men." [...] After counting the number of men and women reviewed in The New York Times in 2011, she found that only 40 percent were female. Additionally, 10 men were given two reviews and a profile, while only one woman was (Téa Obreht, author of our first Book Club pick "The Tiger's Wife").


This is something I expected from an article found via Feministing. However this:

And even if men are favored in the literary fiction world, are reviewers really to blame? Salon reported that, when you look at the demographics of books that are published, reviewers are representing the field accurately. In a survey of imprints big and small, "women accounted for around 30 percent of the list, with small independent presses turning out to be even more male-heavy than a behemoth like Random House."


This would mean, (a) if you want to look for sexism, you should look somewhere else (publishing) and (b) if there is a bias, women are actually overrepresented (30% of published books / 40% of reviewed books). Oh my....

1 comment:

  1. We must throw these insane feminist logics to the dirt pit.

    ReplyDelete