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...

What does it mean to be a dad today? My husband wants to know…. Read more...

My husband, Mark Trainer, has a story in the WaPo today. It’s called “Odd Man Out: A Stay-at-Home Dad Wonders What Comes Next,” and you should read it. UPDATE, 4/23: Mark’s story generated a lot of letters and emails, mostly very thoughtful. The Post ran some this week…. Read more...

That’s the headline that the Washington Post gave my review of Dee Dee Myers’s new book, Why Women Should Rule the World. Myers, as you may recall, was Bill Clinton’s first press secretary, and the first woman in the job. I’m not sure where the wisdom lies—I found very little in the book—but there surely was pain in the reviewing of it. Books like this set feminism back a good decade. Here’s my lead: “If women truly want to rule the world, they will stop writing books with titles like Why Women Should Rule the World.”… Read more...

The blogosphere’s been afire for the last day or so with reactions to an op-ed by Charlotte Allen that ran in the Washington Post, my hometown paper and former employer, this past Sunday. The headline and subhed pretty much sum it up: “Women v. Women: We Scream, We Swoon. How Dumb Can We Get?” Among the highlights: Allen suggests that we ladies make worse drivers, mathematicians, and philosophers because our brains are smaller than men’s. Yeah. Anyway, I’ve posted about some academic-blog reaction over at the Chronicle’s blog Footnoted, including a nifty scientific takedown of Allen’s so-called evidence by Jake… Read more...