Aw, bless. Man problems.

[sheenaghpugh]

Here's an intractable problem for you. The LRB has very few female contributors and it reviews too few books by women. A reader explains to them that she is letting her subscription lapse until this is rectified. Editor writes back. He would love to rectify the situation. But how? It's terribly complicated: "If you were interested, I’d be glad to discuss with you, perhaps in an email exchange, why it may be that women are underrepresented in the paper. I think they’re complicated; actually, as complicated as it gets." (They? Does he mean women are complicated? Or did he perchance think he had used the word "reasons" in his previous sentence?) It keeps him awake at night, but what can he possibly do: "despite the distress it causes us [...] the proportion of women in the paper remains so stubbornly low, the efforts we’ve made to change the situation have been hopelessly unsuccessful."

Poor chap. Can anyone advise him of a way out of this fearful hole?

Comments

[veronica-milvus.livejournal.com]

I already tweeted him to see if he wants my CV as a reviewer.

[veronica-milvus.livejournal.com]

I suppose he could put an editorial in the next edition, specifically requesting that publishers send him books by women...

I think I'll write to him snail-mail.

[sheenaghpugh]

I think his "they", syntactically and potentially unrelated as it is to any actual noun in the correspondence except "women", is an interesting Freudian slip.

[veronica-milvus.livejournal.com]

definitely. But the Vida statistics much have rattled him, so he feels he has to say something.

Laughable but also sad

[cathy bryant (from livejournal.com)]

I'm laughing at this, but my laughter is hollow. He really can't see a solution to this, can he? I can't help wondering if he's the sort of editor who rejects pieces on the grounds that "no one would be interested in this except women" (I've had that a couple of times), and whether he has any female staff reading the slush pile. And whether he is aware of his own prejudices at all.