Jennifer Howard

I promised I’d have more thoughts on those anger-provoking VIDA stats about how men get published and reviewed more often in literary venues than women do. A lot of the commentary about the situation irritated me in a different way. It’s vital to call attention to the problem. But is hand-wringing and lamentation about how women don’t have enough confidence and talk of some kind of ur “female experience” really going to improve the situation? It’s going to take editors and publishers doing some serious soul-searching and numbers-crunching of their own—taking a hard look at what and whom they publish… Read more...

If you follow litchat at all, you’re aware by now that the online literary community VIDA (“Women in Literary Arts”) took a look at the gender breakdown of reviewers and authors featured in top-tier mags and journals in 2010. The numbers aren’t pretty. The Atlantic, the Boston Review, Granta, Harper’s, The New Yorker, the London Review of Books, The New Republic, my old employer The New York Review of Books, the NYTBR, the Paris Review, the TLS and more: Very few of these esteemed literary venues look too female-friendly by VIDA’s count. We know women write. We know women read…. Read more...