Where are the female reviewers?
GENDER PARITY is found lacking in literary criticism on books pages of journals and newspapers
Women are underrepresented in politics, on corporate boards, and, apparently, in the literary pages of our journals and newspapers.
In 2011, only 16 per cent of the book reviews published in the National Post were written by adult women, a number that rises to an equally dismal 17 per cent at The Walrus. This according to figures published by Canadian Women in the Literary Arts (CWILA), a grassroots, donor-funded organization that was founded last spring to tackle gender imbalances in literary criticism.
The idea of this kind of gender count is not new. CWILA is modelled on the U.S. organization VIDA, which conducts a yearly tally of the gender of writers published or reviewed in some of the English-speaking world’s leading literary outlets such as The Atlantic, The New Yorker and the London Review of Books. The VIDA numbers have revealed an almost across-the-board gender gap, with significantly more men reviewing and being reviewed — overall and in most individual publications — for the two years that this count has been conducted so far.
Gillian Jerome, a poet and essayist and instructor of English at UBC, was inspired to institute a Canadian version of the VIDA count in the wake of the Vancouver 125 Poetry Conference held in October 2011, explained fellow CWILA member Laura Moss. The conference had been organized — by Jerome’s partner, Brad Cran, then Vancouver’s poet laureate — with gender parity in mind, but in spite of the equal number of men and women in attendance, the men spoke more, and garnered more attention.
“That really stood out to Gillian,” explained Moss, an associate professor of English whose office is down the hall from Jerome’s at UBC. “That was when she started thinking about what kind of response there is to women poets in particular, but also to women writers.”
As they embarked on the count, neither Jerome nor Moss assumed the VIDA stats would also apply to Canada.
“I don’t think that what is happening in American literary culture reflects what is going on in Canada,” said Moss, who is also an editor for the journal Canadian Literature.
“That’s where my interest was most piqued, about what makes the conversation in Canada distinct to Canada. … But when the actual counting happened, it was remarkable. … The first results were quick to show that there is really quite a disproportionate representation.”
The count, which initially examined more than 2,000 reviews from 14 nationally circulated publications, revealed that 64 per cent of the book reviews in The Globe and Mail and 71 per cent of the reviews in Canadian Notes & Queries had been written by men in 2011. As for The Literary Review of Canada, 74 per cent of both reviewers and authors reviewed were male. Forty-four per cent of the reviews were men reviewing men, and only a third of the books were being reviewed by people of the other gender, Moss said.
Some may wonder why book reviews — by or about men or women — matter, period. The Gazette’s literary critic, Ian McGillis, offered an opinion in a recent interview: “There are so few avenues for writers to publicize themselves. The decision as to what gets reviewed and what doesn’t has a direct effect on how well a book does. If a book is not getting reviewed, it has next to no chance of breaking into the marketplace.”
The CWILA numbers did show that some of the publications stood out in terms of gender parity, notably a last-minute addition to the count, Montreal-based Maisonneuve magazine, perhaps lending credence to McGillis’s supposition that our literary scene “is more women-friendly” than some. Toronto’s This Magazine published and reviewed more female writers than men. (The Gazette was not included in the count, but a quick count featured roughly 62 per cent female reviewers and 62 male authors reviewed in 2011.)
The CWILA numbers have faced criticism, with some arguing that the sample was too small to be truly meaning- ful. “You have got to be wary of small samples,” McGillis concurred.
Juliet Waters, a former book critic for the Montreal Mirror, said that “although it’s healthy to have the debate, you can’t run a newspaper section like you run an academic program,” adding that “our review sections are dull,
“The subjects that people still want to read are dominated by men.”
FORMER BOOK CRITIC JULIET WATERS
and that is more of a problem than gender imbalance.”
Should editors and reviewers be held responsible for what at heart may be a problem with our culture? “If I sat around trying to quota things, I wouldn’t be able to do it,” Waters said. “You still have to prioritize the subjects that people want to read — and the subjects that people still want to read are dominated by men.
“You have the problem that women are not as assertive and relentless in the promo- tion of their work as men are,” she added.
“I don’t have an explanation for why that is,” reflected Linda Leith, of Linda Leith Publishing and founder of the Blue Metropolis international literary festival. Leith wrote on the topic of “gender bias in the book world” for The Globe and Mail’s In Other Words blog this spring, at a time when, “as a fledgling publisher,” she “was being bombarded with manuscripts by men.” She wonders whether men “are better at promoting themselves. … That may be part of it. They may have more faith in their work. … There are all sorts of considerations you can think about.”
For Leith, CWILA is worthwhile. She believes “that we do need people to keep track of some of these things,” and that the CWILA count keeps the issue of gender parity “in the public eye.” She hopes that it will also encourage women to put their work forward.
Toronto writer, literary blogger and editor at 49thShelf.com Kerry Clare suggests that it already has. After seeing the numbers, she has started doing more to get into print.
“It’s with the intention of making those numbers look different next year that I’ve made a point of getting out there and seizing opportunities. It has also been easier to have the nerve to do these things knowing that I’ve got so many men and women on my side who feel the same way I do, as demonstrated by CWILA’s membership,” she said.
CWILA has also launched a critic-in-residence position for Canadian female writers, to be occupied, for 2013, by Montreal poet Sue Sinclair, who will review debut works by English- and French-language writers.
Moss, who served as the manager of the critic-in-residence selection committee, said CWILA “has pointed to a problem that people suspected existed. … Now we’ve proven that it exists, and we want to work to change it.”
Ultimately, CWILA is trying to advance Canada’s literary culture at large.
“Literary citizenship, that is what we’re trying to build with CWILA. It goes beyond gender.”