An Alarming Breakdown of Gender Bias in Literary Outlets

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VIDA, a website devoted to women in the literary arts, recently released their 2011 comparison of the rates of publication for women vs. men in important literary outlets like The Atlantic, Harper’s, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and many more, all in handy, mildly alarming pie-chart form. If you’ve been paying any attention to this issue at all in recent years, you may not be surprised to find out that, almost across the board, women writers are wildly underrepresented compared to their male counterparts, whether they be book reviewers, book authors, or writers of magazine articles. While there are a couple notable exceptions (hooray for Granta, which published men and women in almost equal measure in 2011), the vast majority hovers around 25% female, 75% male. Which, while not particularly new information, still sort of rankles. Click through to see a few examples of the gender breakdowns in literary coverage from major news outlets, visit VIDA for the whole list — and then let’s get to work putting a little more blue on the board.