Where Have All the Women Gone?

As war dominates the headlines, journalists, scholars and others interested in public policy have noticed a growing silence: the absence of women's voices in the nation's elite media. The war has only accelerated a trend that has been brewing for some time: the Spiral of Silence.

On too many opinion pages, you find men writing the same thing over and over about Iraq, terrorism and military questions, while room just can't be found for other issues -- or even women with a perspective on international issues. Even on the topic of Affirmative Action -- an issue of extreme importance to women -- this week The New York Times and The Washington Post opinion pages had all-male line-ups. (Some papers, it should be said, manage to do better. The Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe, for example, display both a wide range of issues and a fair number of women writers.)

Women's voices aren't heard and that de-legitimizes women, which in turn deepens the silence.

From opinion pages to brainy magazines to journals of opinion, women's voices are more muted than they have been in years. As columnist Alicia Mundy writes in Editor and Publisher, at The Washington Post, "Op-ed pages are bulging with deep 'insider' pieces on foreign affairs to the near exclusion of more immediate issues. Second, these pages are almost entirely devoid of women." She notes that if you did a cursory search of the last two year's opinion pages, "you would be alarmed at the lack of diversity among writers and among subjects beyond foreign affairs."

At The New York Times, the same situation generally prevails. In the month between November 4 and December 4 of 2002, for example, an online search revealed that of the non-regular columns on the opinion page, 60 were by men and 14 by women. (Three bylines featured names that were androgynous, so hard to quantify.) Two of these pieces by women could be called very light, one about the perfect Christmas gifts, another by Miss Manners on etiquette. When all opinion page bylines were counted, of 92 writers, only 19 were women. And as the nation lurched into war, the situation has not improved.

Even veteran women journalists have trouble getting heard these days. Mundy writes that Pulitzer Prize winner and syndicated columnist Ellen Goodman complained to her about getting bumped too often at The Washington Post. Geneva Overholser, the former Ombudsman at the Post and a respected editor and journalist, has been writing for some time about the vanishing of women's voices on opinion pages and has noted the Post's "white male culture."

If you read many opinion pages these days, you would think that issues of poverty, race, sexism, the health care crisis, working families, stem cell research and education had simply vanished from the planet. Mundy notes that at the Post, the opinion pages are now "ploddingly predictable." She says "Several columnists are still trying to kick Bill Clinton (he's gone, guys) and most of the time they gorge on what we women sarcastically used to call 'Big - - - - Issues' (suggesting an excess of testosterone)."

At the most respected magazines and journals, the situation is not much better. Look at The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly -- once again, you will see few female bylines.

At the Atlantic, there exists what might be called a journalistic apartheid where women are concerned. If you're a regular reader of the publication, which I am, you'd think that some sort of plague had decimated the female population. Between December 2001 and December 2002, for example, I found 38 major articles by men and seven by women. Two of these women were writing with their more famous husbands; another was doing an anecdotal piece on cross-dressing. So for serious pieces, the total is 38 to 4. The essays were even worse. During this period, I found 41 essays by men and two by women. Or to be precise, two essays by the same woman. For the Atlantic, Margaret Talbot represented all of womanhood.