Wednesday, May 16, 2012

New Yorker Parity Report - May 21, 2012

This week the parity rate nudges up to 34%, thanks to one more female and one less male than last week - the overall number of bylines is again 23. If this keeps up we may reach parity in a month. But it won't.

And speaking of the New Yorker, I couldn't help responding to this trashing of DEATH OF A SALESMAN with this:
DEATH OF A SALESMAN may have flaws, but as even Giles Harvey admits, that hasn't kept it from being deeply moving to many people. Although Harvey quotes Thoreau in a rare positive comment on SALESMAN, Thoreau has more in common with Harvey than with Miller:
"Thoreau was tilting at a century earlier, when he wrote, in “Walden,” “We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.”
The people who have friends and family living in Maine and Texas, who believe that a magnetic telegraph might contain communications that could be deeply meaningful to them personally are fools to the anti-social Thoreau, who, like Giles Harvey, is certain that the only way to respectably experience worthwhile meaning is through pristine austere self-contained perfection.

The New Yorker Parity Report

A regular report on the gender parity - or lack thereof - of the current issue of The New Yorker based on table of contents by-lines
Includes fiction, non-fiction, poems. Does not include illustrations.


A score of 50% means that half of all writers in the issue are female.
A score of greater than 50% would mean more female than male writers. This never happens.


Parity change from previous week: +4%

May 21, 2012

Total writers: 23
male: 15
female: 8
gender parity score: 34%

Last week's score
Total writers: 23
male: 16
female: 7
gender parity score: 30%