If Susan Estrich wants to improve America’s opinion pages, she should stand up for more diversity of thought.
She assumed he would understand. But he didn’t. Emailing the head of Op-Ed at the Los Angeles Times to protest the unjust treatment of women writers seemed like a good idea — until the rest of the country found out, igniting a firestorm of feminist tetchiness and good-natured derision. She never expected to find a fellow female columnist calling her campaign “crazed” and “nasty.” This wasn’t good, and she knew it.
“Depending on the day or the paper,” wrote Susan Estrich, professor, columnist, and woman, “three or four of the columns you read on the typical opinion page are likely to be written by a man, and if you're lucky, one by a woman. If you add the cartoon, which is almost always by a man, you can get to five or six opinions by men and one by a woman.” She further calculates that the L.A. Times has only 14.3% women writers on a given day, while the New York Times wins by a hair with 16%, proving that it’s much more girly than other papers of its kind. “The numbers speak for themselves,” she says. “They can't be avoided.”
Strictly statistically, Estrich is right. There are more male columnists than female columnists, just as there are more straight columnists than gay columnists, and more white columnists than black columnists. Where Estrich is wrong is in assuming that bare stats directly relate to an individual writer’s ability to inspire change. Consider the Newspaper of Record, every Republican’s favorite news organization. They have five regular males on Op-Ed (kind of), and one female. It’s Brooks, Friedman, Herbert, Kristof, and Krugman, versus Maureen Dowd.
The reason that’s not as bad as it seems is that Dowd, the only woman, has all the power. Ask anyone who regularly reads the Times’ op-ed page what Bob Herbert’s last column was about. A clever response would be “Iraq,” since that’s mainly what he busies himself with, but no one actually knows. Does Bob Herbert even remember? He’s a fine writer — despite having the foreign-policy IQ of a tubeworm — but his work is regrettably forgettable. Same goes for all the others, even the sole conservative, David Brooks. Dowd is the only one that matters. That’s not to say that the others are completely without merit, but clearly she’s the star writer. She may be but a small slice of the Times’ sweet, maudlin, left-wing pie, but she’s what everyone’s waiting for.
It’s not enough to look at the statistical evidence. Percentages are good for grading tests, but rather ineffective when determining the place of women in editorializing. There are more men than women writing op-eds, but women are certainly equal to men in terms of prominence. Just ask Bob Herbert.
Remember, also, what this debate does for aspiring women writers. As Anne Applebaum, female columnist for the Washington Post said, “…every woman who gets her article accepted will have to wonder whether it was her knowledge of Irish politics, her willingness to court controversy or just her gender that won the editor over….Happy, Susan Estrich?”
One last point: might minority-status be beneficial to women? Doesn’t their uniqueness make their work more interesting to readers? We must take an Elle Woods approach: If something seems like a negative (blonde hair or being a woman, for instance), make it a positive. We don’t need to debate the merits of columnists based on their chromosomes. We need to debate their views. Liberals like to talk about diversity of gender and sexual orientation and race, but rarely do they support diversity of opinion.
If Susan Estrich wants to improve America’s opinion pages, she should stand up for more diversity of thought. That’s something the New York Times desperately needs. As Estrich has pointed out, the bestselling author Ann Coulter can’t get into a newspaper big enough to be included in the Lexis-Nexis archives. Naturally, being a feminist, Estrich assumes this is because Coulter’s a woman. That’s a nice PC theory, but it’s not the truth. The reason that the best Ann can do is Human Events, the important but small conservative weekly, is that, unlike Dowd or Estrich, Ann supports a flat tax and killing lots of terrorists. It has nothing to do with her gender.
So here’s my message to editors around the country: hire as many as women as you want — but make sure they all voted for Bush.
isterrett@hotmail.com
Read more articles by Isaiah Z. Sterrett
