Occasionally one comes across people (ie. morons) who think that feminism’s work is done, or that being a feminist is in some way an old fashioned notion.
These morons need to look at this: VIDA’S THE COUNT. Don’t bother with the text at the top, just look at the pie charts, and feel your mind boggle. It’s a comparison of the numbers of books reviewed in major magazines broken down by gender. For example, The Times Literary Supplement, in its wisdom, found 1075 male writers worthy of review, and just 378 female. Take that ladies.
Here’s another:
Meghan O’Rourke at Slade has an interesting take on all this, particularly as regards unconscious bias. She points out, in an interesting parallel, that once blind auditions were instituted for major orchestras, the recruitment of women went up – well, let’s see if you can guess how much:
a) Not at all
b) Only a teensy tiny bit
c) TENFOLD.
Yeah. Damn skippy.
See also the Franzenfreude debate, where there was much discussion around whether Jonathan Franzen FREEDOM would have been so celebrated, given its domestic setting, were it written by a woman.
What we have learnt from this is that when I become a famous author, I am so going to go by the name S.M NORMAN.