Feminist Law Professors

At WomenTK.com, Ruth Konigsberg noted:

I started this website in the fall of 2005 because I’d been noticing a lack of female voices in what are supposed to be general-interest (and therefore gender-neutral) magazines. I wanted to find out if men were consistently getting published more than women, and if so, to quantify the disparity. Which magazines had the worst record of publishing women? Which had the best?

I picked the following five magazines to track: The Atlantic, Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, and Vanity Fair, the so-called”thought leaders”which also happen to identify themselves as general interest. (I omitted the newsweeklies because so much of the copy has multiple bylines.) Over the course of a year, the overall average shows that these magazines publish stories by male writers three times more often than they do stories by female writers, thereby supporting Ursula K. Le Guin’s hypothesis that”there is solid evidence for the fact that when women speak more than 30 percent of the time, men perceive them as dominating the conversation.”At The New Yorker, the ratio was four to one. At Harper’s, it was almost seven to one.

These numbers are particularly surprising considering how many women read these magazines. The New Yorker, for example, has an audience of 1,799,000 women and 1,710,000 men, according to a 2006 report by Mediamark Research Inc. The Atlantic’s current audience, Mediamark Research estimates, is 609,000 women and 747,000 men. At Vanity Fair, there are almost three times as many female readers as male readers. When asked to describe the typical reader of The New York Times Magazine, editor Gerald Marzorati replied,”I imagine my reader is a late-thirties-something woman, a lawyer or educator or businesswoman. She’s busy with work, and also with family matters, but Sunday morning is a time she’ll allow herself to read something that is not work related, or kids’ homework related. She wants to lose herself in a story, one big story:8,000, 9,000 words. My hunch is she wants to read not something escapist but something substantive:something that holds a mirror up to her own life or opens a window onto a pretty troubled world.”(NYT, 10/9/05) What’s more, research conducted by Time Inc. in 2005 showed a decline in the number of men reading magazines, while female readership held steady. (BusinessWeek Online, 11/07/05)

The numbers speak volumes, but they’re not the whole story. As a former editor at The New Yorker wrote me in an e-mail,”in addition to counting bylines, you should look at what women are allowed to write about. I’ve been struck by a pattern, at The Atlantic in particular, where women only seem to write about marriage, motherhood and nannies, obsessively so. If you count the number of women’s bylines there that weren’t about hearth and home, the number would approach zero.”And a current student at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism also noted,”At The New Yorker, it seems as though many of the female bylines aren’t for hard-news-type stories. Women write about dance, or they write the short story, or a poem, or a profile of a fashion designer, or something. But the ‘heavy’ stories are left to the guys.”

Her data for “general interest” magazines is here.

Above is a photo that accompanies a NYT story entitled: “Thailand Tourists: ‘Coup? What Coup?'” The thesis of the article is that tourism is still thriving in Thailand, but the unsurprising subtext is that Thai tourists are sort of clueless and self-centered. Here is an excerpt from the article:

Coup? What coup? That seems to be the attitude among travelers and travel professionals as the recent political turmoil in Thailand appears to have had little or no effect on tourism there. After all, the embattled prime minister, who had led a grudgingly accepted social order campaign in 2001 that mandated a 1 a.m. closing time for most of Bangkok’s bars and nightclubs, was not very popular among the city’s residents.

In fact, when tanks rolled into Bangkok, Thais presented soldiers with flowers and candy, and many troops gladly posed for photographs with foreigners. In Phuket, unperturbed beachgoers sipped”coup cocktails”at beachside bars. And if the opening of a new international airport outside Bangkok on Sept. 28 is any indication, the provisional rulers seem intent on making sure that the tourism industry : which Thai officials say draws more than 11 million tourists a year : continues apace. The Associated Press has reported that the $3.8 billion, six-million-square-foot airport : meant to be the centerpiece of Mr. Thaksin’s political legacy : can handle 76 flights an hour and 45 million passengers a year.

Of course, there are some very real concerns. Critics worry about the temporary suspension of certain civil liberties around the country, in particular, curbs placed on public gatherings, political activity and the local news media. The United States State Department and ministries in other countries in Australia and Britain have encouraged travelers to exercise extra caution.

Tour operators and hotels, however, report few cancellations. Luxury-tour operators like Abercrombie & Kent and Cox & Kings, for instance, said that none of their clients had chosen to change their plans.

Seven people were quoted in the article, four travelers to Thailand and three people who work in the travel industry. Judging by their first names, six were men, including all four of the travelers. Yet who is that in the photo, visually representing touristic obliviousness?

–Ann Bartow

Though it is somewhat limited in scope, empirical research on the differences in in-class participation rates between female and male law students (both “observed” and self-reported) consistently suggests that males volunteer and speak more than females do. (See e.g. this article at around page 828, et seq.) This data contrasts fairly dramatically with assertions made in “The Female Brain”by Louann Brizendine. At the Language Log blog, Mark Liberman noted:

It’s recently fashionable for books and articles to enlist neuroscience in support of the view that men and women are essentially and unavoidably different, not just in size and shape, but also in just about every aspect of the way they see, hear, feel, talk, listen and think. These works tend to confirm our culture’s current stereotypes and prejudices, and the science they cite is often overinterpreted, and sometimes seems simply to have been made up. I recently discussed an example from Leonard Sax’s book Why Gender Matters (“Are men emotional children?“, 6/24/2006), which David Brooks has used to support an argument for single-sex education. The latest example of this genre, released August 1, is Louann Brizendine‘s book “The Female Brain“.

Here’s what its jacket blurb says:

Every brain begins as a female brain. It only becomes male eight weeks after conception, when excess testosterone shrinks the communications center, reduces the hearing cortex, and makes the part of the brain that processes sex twice as large.
Louann Brizendine, M.D. is a pioneering neuropsychiatrist who brings together the latest findings to show how the unique structure of the female brain determines how women think, what they value, how they communicate, and who they’ll love. Brizendine reveals the neurological explanations behind why
• A woman uses about 20,000 words per day while a man uses about 7,000
• A woman remembers fights that a man insists never happened
• A teen girl is so obsessed with her looks and talking on the phone
• Thoughts about sex enter a woman’s brain once every couple of days but enter a man’s brain about once every minute
• A woman knows what people are feeling, while a man can’t spot an emotion unless somebody cries or threatens bodily harm
• A woman over 50 is more likely to initiate divorce than a man
Women will come away from this book knowing that they have a lean, mean communicating machine. Men will develop a serious case of brain envy.

I looked through the book to try to find the research behind the 20,000-vs.-7,000-words-per-day claim, and I looked on the web as well, but I haven’t been able to find it yet. Brizendine also claims that women speak twice as fast as men (250 words per minute vs. 125 words per minute). These are striking assertions from an eminent scientist, with big quantitative differences confirming the standard stereotype about those gabby women and us laconic guys. The only trouble is, I’m pretty sure that both claims are false.

Liberman has a who series of posts about this topic, listed here, plus a new entry today where he notes with respect to this assertion: Did you know that, on average, women use 15,000 words a day while men use 7,000?

Reader, did you know that, on average, there are 23 different versions of this phony comparison published every day in the world’s media? Well, that’s not true either — but I think this is the 11th different pair that I’ve come across so far, ranging from a high of 50,000 vs. 25,000 to a low of 5,000 vs. 2,500. (And in case you’re coming late to this discussion, all of these numbers seem to have been made up or copied from someone who made them up — the many studies that actually count words and correlate the counts with sex find no group difference, or a relatively small difference. When a difference is found, it’s usually in the direction of more words from men.)

He also explained all this at Boston.com. As for why so many people seem to want to believe that women speak more than men, here is a trenchant observation from Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon:

I think what’s happened is this: The old stereotype was really just,”Women talk too much,”with”too much”being defined as”more than someone in their lowly station should.”But nowadays the people who want to tell women they are out of place and need to STFU can’t just tell women that their chattering mouths are taking up valuable time …. Knowing that they had to pretend to believe in equality, sexists then simply sculpted a myth of the taciturn man to shame women with so we’ll shut up.

NB: Deborah Tannen’s review of “The Female Brain” is excerpted here.

–Ann Bartow

From the Feminist Weekly News:

Media consolidation cuts out women and minority television broadcast stations owners, according to a report released on Wednesday by Free Press, a nonpartisan media reform organization. The report, Out of the Picture: Minority & Female Ownership in the United States analyzed the demographics of television broadcast station owners and found that women and people of color are vastly underrepresented in station ownership. Women own fewer than 5 percent of all broadcast stations but constitute 51 percent of the US population. Minorities own just over 3 percent of all stations but constitute 33 percent of the US population.