Why Are There No Great Women Op-Ed Columnists?

Today's NY Times has a piece by a woman, Patricia Cohen (editor of the newspaper's late, lamented "Arts & Ideas" page), reporting on an effort by an activist-author to train more women to write Op-Ed pieces for newspapers. (I've published six Op-Eds in the NY Times and one in the LA Times.) The article indicates that "65 or 75 percent of unsolicited [Op-Ed] manuscripts, or more, come from men."

But Cohen doesn't even begin to touch the more important question of why there are so few regular female Op-Ed columnists (as opposed to freelance contributors) on newspaper staffs. For many years, the Times has had only one---Maureen Dowd---even though the editorial page editor (who also oversees the Op-Ed page) was, until Jan. 8, a woman. (It is now Andrew Rosenthal.)

The Times sometimes appoints "guest columnists" for short-term Op-Ed stints while regular columnists are away. The last two of those have been women, as if to make up for the chronic estrogen deficit. One of those, Ann Althouse, is a political blogger. (Don't they need a cultural one?)

For an explanation of why women aren't anointed as regular Op-Ed pundits, we go to the one who is, Dowd. Two years ago, in Dish It Out Ladies, she wrote:

There's an intense debate going on now about why newspapers have so few female columnists. Out of what will soon be eight Times Op-Ed columnists---nine, counting the public editor---I'm the only woman....

Men take professional criticism more personally when it comes from a woman....While a man writing a column taking on the powerful may be seen as authoritative, a woman doing the same thing may be seen as castrating.

Since I've begun this opinionated blog, I haven't felt that my targets' responses have been influenced by my gender. But maybe my middle-aged status makes my nagging just seem age-appropriate and non-threatening. Castration's just not my thing. (Perhaps chains and whips.)

What bothers me most is that women in power may be perpetuating the male stereotype that an opinionated women is, if not a harridan, an oxymoron. Dowd comments:

Gail Collins, the first woman to run The Times's editorial page and the author of a history of American women, told The Post's Howard Kurtz: "There are probably fewer women, in the great cosmic scheme of things, who feel comfortable writing very straight opinion stuff, and they're less comfortable hearing something on the news and batting something out."

This reminds me of what I wrote about in my very first CultureGrrl post, almost a year ago: Sreenath Sreenivasan, associate professor at the Columbia University School of Journalism, informed assembled alums at a blogging seminar (which inspired me to start this dubious project) that the blogging community is "very male. There are not many women or minorities." This is supposedly because blogging "takes a leap of faith" and takes an aggressively contentious posture---attitudes that women are presumed to be ill-suited for.

To this Lawrence Summers-like stereotype---that women are not biologically hardwired for expressing strong opinions and (as Collins' said) "batting something out"---CultureGrrl contends:

We're ready to bat 'em out of the park. Just put us in, coach. We're ready to play.