Women in opinion journalism
Dana Goldstein's recent article about the scarcity of female pundits is insufferably condescending. The article is entitled "It's the politics, stupid," which gives you a good idea of what's in store.
Goldstein argues that outgoing New York Times opinion page editor Gail Collins couldn't have raised the profile of female opinion journalists because there just weren't any qualified female applicants for the opinion page.
I don't know enough about the submissions that crossed Gail Collins' desk to say whether she was remiss in spotting female talent. Maybe nobody with two X chromesomes to rub together had the raw analytical power of John Tierney or the penetrating sociological insight of David Brooks. Goldstein doesn't offer evidence one way or the other.
Goldstein admits that Collins was responsible for recruiting some remarkable women for Times Select, but she maintains that these writers were mere "tokens" because they didn't cover "serious" issues like horse race politics:
[I]n fact, it was through the guest columns and blogs behind the Times Select subscription wall that Collins truly did bring more women into the fold, including Slate legal expert Dalia Lithwick; the class-conscious Barabara Ehrenreich; Perfect Madness author Judith Warner; and Pulitzer Prize winning biographer Stacy Schiff. But even these women seem to be tokens. Most of the time, they haven't covered horserace electoral politics, the Iraq War, weapons proliferation, the anti-immigration fence, or any of the other hardball national political topics that op-ed pages prioritize in this time of wars and midterms. (Lithwick is an important exception. Someone offer that woman a higher profile job, pronto.)
Why can David Brooks can spend the better part of his career prattling about patio furniture and still be considered a serious pundit while Barbara Ehrenreich's work on the American class system is dismissed as fluff?
Goldstein maintains that Collins just didn't have the raw material to work with, despite her best intentions:
The whole debate could leave you wondering if women have opinions at all, or if they do, whether they’re capable of expressing them. But look at how viciously female writers like Judith Warner and Caitlin Flanagan lash out at one another in the dreaded “mommy wars.” Women writers certainly aren’t afraid to enter the fray when the topic is housework and child care, sexless marriages and distant husbands.
She goes on to argue that there aren't many women in political punditry because journalism is "observational." Supposedly, women don't like to watch politics because it's just a bunch of men:
Journalism is essentially an observational profession, and it makes sense that many women writers feel detached from a political world that not only showcases very few women, but also relegates “women’s issues” (these days, anything domestic in both senses of the word, whether public education, health care, issues of work-life balance, or student debt) to second-class status.
Goldstein seems to be decrying the type of condescending sexism that she herself engaged in just a few paragraphs earlier. How else to explain her contention that elections and weapons are "serious" political subjects while health care and economics are not?
Goldstein goes on to note that prominent female politicians have to put up with an endless stream of sexist belittlement:
Furthermore, those women who do make it onto the national political stage are hardly liberated from sexism. Hillary Clinton, despite her many attributes, continues to be defined by her marriage to a much more talented politician. Condoleezza Rice is an enigma: Behind those intelligent eyes, does she resent her role as sexy, single-gal shill for the Bush administration’s failed foreign policy? Nancy Pelosi, who come Election Day may very well find herself the first female speaker of the House, remains essentially unknown to most Americans. She recently told Newsweek she maintains a low profile because, as an unabashedly liberal woman (and unfortunately, not usually a very articulate one), she is far too easy for Republicans to target with misogynistic rhetoric.
Goldstein ignores the role of elite opinion journalists in legitimizing and perpetuating these sexist stereotypes. If pundits are willing to repeat sexist canards about female politicians, they probably have similar attitudes about female journalists.
If we see the trials and tribulations of Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton, is it so hard to imagine that other women face similar career obstacles in other professions?
If so many Americans are hesitant to accept women as their political leaders, they probably also have issues with female opinion leaders. Instead of blaming women for their failure to offer their opinions on "serious" issues, Goldstein should examine the reluctance of the general public to take women's opinions seriously.
Update: Ezra argues that women don't get ahead in opinion journalism because they aren't socialized to be as overbearing and arrogant as their male counterparts. He calls it a confidence gap.
As I said in the comments at Ezra's, it's not the confidence gap, it's the deference gap. People don't take as much shit from women as they do from men. I've noticed this as someone who will never back down from an argument. Guys who accept intellectual give and take from each other suddenly get pissy when they're challenged by a girl. Maybe I'm just exceptionally annoying, but I don't get the impression that my social skills are that much worse than the average journalist or politician on Washington or NYC.
An opinion writer's job is to tell people what to think, and a certain segment of the population has a problem with taking direction from women.
Female Americans number 150 million as of last week. Yeah, I just don't know where you'd find women who's are skulls filled with anything but cotton candy. Good grief.
Posted by: cfrost | October 24, 2006 at 09:20 PM
If you want to be extraordinarily charitable, you can say that Goldstein isn't really engaging in sexist stereotyping, but complaining that women can't break into mainstream journalism because established journalists consider horserace politics and the one or two issues of the day to be all a serious writer should concentrate on.
Posted by: Alon Levy | October 24, 2006 at 09:50 PM
She seems to believe the rhetoric, though. Why else would she dismiss Ehrenreich, et al. as mere tokens? She might be attributing extreme sexism to Gail Collins. I.e., that Collins must have considered these women to be tokens, because like all mainstream journalists, she never really respected anyone unless they wrote about weapons and elections. Somehow that doesn't strike me as plausible, given who she actually hired for the opinion page (Brooks and Tierney).
Goldstein also seems to be arguing that women aren't interested in politics because there aren't enough women in politics--because women only want to look at other women. That seems like a sexist assumption to me.
Posted by: Lindsay Beyerstein | October 24, 2006 at 10:05 PM
"...unless they wrote about weapons and elections"
It may not be the most important factor, but a factor might be the kinds of opinions women have, to the degree they differ in opinions and as a class from men. You will find hawkish women, but in general women will be less hawkish than men. When filling a final slot, the twofer of a hawkish pro-choice man might be irresistable. Woman are marginally more socialistic and favor gov't spending more than men.
IOW, there is a level of conformity and conventional wisdom at the top level of punditry that favors men over women in hiring. You can let Barbara Ehrenreich guest-post, but you couldn't have two or three people with her politics on the opinion page.
Posted by: bob mcmanus | October 24, 2006 at 11:36 PM
I think you caught the double whammy: a pro-choice hawkish man is a find, but a woman who is opinionated and writes on healthcare is commonplace. Or insufferable if she writes on military affairs. So there are never enough qualified women. Nor will there ever be, by definition. Maybe newspapers need the equivalent of blind auditions. Symphony orchestras had a remarkably similar problem: Women who auditioned were never up to snuff for some reason (insert a disparaging adjective here). But with the introduction of blind auditions, more orchestras hired more women as suddenly, oh my goodness, judges had to rely solely on the quality of performance in making choices. Then again, that might threaten some current columnists.
Posted by: Georgiana | October 25, 2006 at 12:12 AM
Many years ago Flora Lewis wrote on the op-ed page of the Times. Hers were fine thougtful pieces about international relations and the like. I don't think she was there as a representative of womankind. About the same time, Ada Louise Huxtable wrote about architecture for the Times. Her pieces were, and are, the best things of their kind. At some point, however, the Times decided they needed a woman on the op-ed page who would be recognized far and wide as a woman. The result was the ineffable Anna Quindlen. Their pictue of what women are like and like to read still horrifies me. Gail Collins, though an improvement, was continued the tradition as does Maureen Dowd. MD can be funny and insightful, but am I the only one who finds the gossip girl persona a tiresome distraction and the idea that that's the point of view characteristic of women more than a little condescending?
Posted by: J | October 25, 2006 at 12:41 AM
I like Krugman, but the other NYT opinion writers aren't that good. Brooks is an affable neo-imperialist. Maureen Dowd elevates personality above any discussion of policy. Tierney is a non-entity -- change him with one of those Techcentralstation flacks and you'd never notice the difference. Friedman is a globalization evangelist.
It's sad that the page has such great influence.
Posted by: anon | October 25, 2006 at 12:59 AM
Ah, also about arrogance vs. deference: it happens among men as well. It's about hierarchy, and women are automatically seen as lower on the heirarchy (all other things being equal).
You'll notice this on news shows where interviewers won't ask tough or rude questions of high status men, and the reverse happens to lower status men. For example, when Sen. Obama was interviewed by Russert the first time, Russert asked him about some odd opinion that Harry Belafonte uttered. On the other hand, when Obama was on Meet the Press last Sunday, he pretty much got the kid gloves treatment. Between the two interviews, Obama's social status had risen in Washington.
Another example might be Lieberman. He views Republicans as being higher status than him, and often agrees or agrees to disagree with Republicans on even their most repugnant opinions. Yet, when he is challenged by low status democrats like, in his opinion Lamont, he gets angry and upset.
I'm going off the curb and into the weeds, so I'll just praise Lindsey for her blog. I try to check it 3 or 4 times a week, just to get her take on events, but I will admit I'm a low status male -- I'm just a house painter.
I wonder if many higher status men like middle managers are put off by her blog and other women's blogs.
Posted by: anon | October 25, 2006 at 01:15 AM
Ezra and McManus, while not wrong, concede too much to the Goldstein argument. Remember, we are talking about a tiny number of individuals here.
The personal characteristics that make a successful elite opinion may be more common among men than women, even -- for the sake of argument -- far more common. There are still far more women with those characteristics than there are opinion slots at the NYT, Washington Post, etc. So the only explanation of the lack of women in those slots is that the people who hire for them aren't interested in hiring women.
Posted by: lemuel pitkin | October 25, 2006 at 01:24 AM
I wonder if many higher status men like middle managers are put off by her blog and other women's blogs.
I don't know if I count as a higher status man, but I'm not put off my female blogs (my blogroll is almost 2/3 female). But I'm also too individualist to give a damn about group definitions like "female," "black," etc.
Posted by: Alon Levy | October 25, 2006 at 02:12 AM
the anti-immigration fence, or any of the other hardball national political topics
If by 'hardball', Goldstein means 'bullshit', then she's correct. If not... well, not. Talk about priorities.
For comparison's sake, look at the print edition of the Guardian or Independent (or even the conservative broadsheets in the UK). You'll find a far greater proportion of women op-ed columnists, discussing topics that aren't idiot creations of the idiot newscycle.
Posted by: pseudonymous in nc | October 25, 2006 at 03:25 AM
--am I the only one who finds the gossip girl persona a tiresome distraction and the idea that that's the point of view characteristic of women more than a little condescending?--
It's funny...I don't know of a single man or woman who is impressed with Maureen Dowd anymore. She's not even worth a quick scan anymore. Given an incredible platform, she has used it to speak of her dating life. Who the hell cares?
Many people grow over time. Maureen's grown smaller,smaller, smaller....
Posted by: The Phantom | October 25, 2006 at 09:37 AM
Maybe we should start a writing campaign to lobby for Katha Pollitt as the next op-ed writer for the NYT or some other major paper. Also, there are lots of op-ed writers that get started by doing journalism and there are more than a few female journalists covering political subjects. Dana Priest comes to mind.
Posted by: Barbara | October 25, 2006 at 10:38 AM
Barbara
Do you have links to the people you speak of?
If I were doing the hiring (scary thought) I'd look for someone who is not a lib/conservative partisan--ie Bob Herbert, Malkin--someone who really thinks things through and can take unorthodox stances based on how they see the facts.
Posted by: The Phantom | October 25, 2006 at 10:47 AM
Whoah, I agreed with the Phantom!
Posted by: Matthias | October 25, 2006 at 10:51 AM
In Collins' defense, she did exactly what Goldstein doesn't recognize--she broadened the definition of arguable issues worthy of editorial space well beyond the conventional horse-race, and often enough horse's-ass, approach, and did so by introducing voices not until then quite admissible to the Times' pages. But I kept expecting her to shatter more Gray Ladyish glass than she did. In the end I think she played along as a less splashy Maureen Dowd instead of breaking ground in a way that would permanently redirect the Times' editorial pages. It's a lost opportunity.
Posted by: Pierre Tristam/Candide's Notebooks | October 25, 2006 at 11:01 AM
"Permanently redirecting the Editorial Pages"sounds scary and quota-ish.
The weakest players on the NY Times Op-Ed page are Bob Herbert, who seems to only write columns about a prisoner who he thinks is innocent, or Maureen Dowd, who took her worldwide magaphone and used it to write about her dating woes and how she thinks GWB has a Hemlet thing about Daddy or whatever.
There are female and black voices. The problem is not that they don't toe any ideological point of view, the problem is that they don't write very well.
Regardless of what one thinks of Tom Friedman, he is exactly the type of person who belongs on an Op Ed page--provocative, deep global knowledge, writes well.
So maybe a better Op Ed would start with firing Herbert and Dowd and replacing them with maybe female and black writers who are provocative, have global knowledge, who write well, and who can't be pinned down.
That would "redirect" the Op Ed page towards better writing and a better marketplace of ideas.
Posted by: The Phantom | October 25, 2006 at 11:16 AM
Tom Friedman is a classic example of the deference gap. A woman with Friedman's background simply couldn't get away with spouting that kind of sentimental pretentious, but authoritative-sounding bullshit.
Because Friedman's a middle aged white guy who's travelled a lot, people are willing to regard him as some sort of expert whose Grand Pronouncements are actually based on wisdom rather than chuztpah and wishful thinking.
Maureen Dowd sucks.
As far as I'm concerned Paul Krugman is the only interesting columnist on the NYT op/ed page. He actually knows stuff about stuff. Bob Herbert is a good writer and his instincts are good, but I seldom learn much from his pieces. Frank Rich is okay, but he doesn't inspire or provoke me.
Posted by: Lindsay Beyerstein | October 25, 2006 at 11:21 AM
Well, I think Friedman is more than " a middle aged white guy who's travelled a lot". He's someone who has lived in Beirut and Jerusalem and who knows the region well and all the players there, reasonably well. That in itself counts for a lot.
Re the deference gap stuff, its all hyptothetical, as I know of no US female opinion writer who approaches his experience in the Middle East, forgetting about the "travel" elsewhere.
Krugman's good. Doctrinnaire, but seriously smart. And I really liked his efforts to highlight human trafficking in Asia and other issues that normally don't get the time of day in the media.
Posted by: The Phantom | October 25, 2006 at 11:34 AM
You will find hawkish women, but in general women will be less hawkish than men
I would like to see that statistic broken down by previous military enrolement though. In the US a large proportion of men have been through the armed services and hardly any women. One function of the armed services is to make people more conducive to killing and aggression and war --- after all a soldier that won't kill is no use.
So are men more pro-war or have they just been brainwashed more by the state?
That's to say nothing of the more subtle social influences on men to be more aggressive. In a lot of respects men are expected to become more violent to enable women to become less overtly violent.
Posted by: DavidByron | October 25, 2006 at 11:44 AM
When it comes down to it--gender and political allegiances aside--column writing in the US these days is bland, repetitive, poorly written, criminally conventional. Krugman can crack his whip well enough, Kinsley has his moments, Chait in the LATimes Krugmanizes once in a while, but the established press' punditocracy is what IBM was in the 1980s--moribund and getting clobbered by upstart Microsoft, i.e. blogs Chris Hedges Truthdig, Eteraz on Islamic issues, the Rude Pundit on just about anything: they punch and brawl with ideas and provocation where the more establishment writers are still chatting up cliches a-la-Broder or giving us the OpEd page's equivalent of locker-room humor (Dowd). No wonder people ain't reading papers anymore.
Posted by: Pierre Tristam/Candide's Notebooks | October 25, 2006 at 11:53 AM
Traveling does not automatically make a person wise. Particularly when that person is Friedman.
I agree 100% with Lindsay regarding the Times columnists. I am appalled by the lack of quality on their op-ed page. Krugman is the only one who consistently writes things that bear spending the time it takes to read them.
As for Goldstein's argument, I think it is wrong. I agree with the person who mentioned blind auditions. My sister works for the Cleveland Orchestra now (a violinist) and I bet the amount of women in that particular orchestra are a direct result of blind auditions. If no one knew your gender and actually made decisions based on your merit a lot more women would have the high-profile jobs.
Posted by: Anna in Portland (was Cairo) | October 25, 2006 at 12:16 PM
"There are still far more women with those characteristics than there are opinion slots at the NYT, Washington Post, etc."
Agreed. Yglesias makes the same critical point. I would only mitigate the "conscious discrimination" with the fact that I don't quite understand how the present crew is selected. If networking and connections are crucial that would be a more indirect discrimination.
Posted by: bob mcmanus | October 25, 2006 at 12:35 PM
Is there an e-mail address to complain about Dana to the editors of TAP? (assuming that they'd listen)
Posted by: Barry | October 25, 2006 at 12:39 PM
Update: Ezra argues that women don't get ahead in opinion journalism because they aren't socialized to be as overbearing and arrogant as their male counterparts. He calls it a confidence gap.
As I said in the comments at Ezra's, it's not the confidence gap, it's the deference gap. People don't take as much shit from women as they do from men.
Maybe 'cause I'm a guy (like Ezra) I'm missing something, but I'm closer to Ezra on this. It isn't though, that women are necessarily less overbearing and arrogant, though, it's more of a matter of how one goes about being overbearing and arrogant. Because men are socialized to be overbearing and arrogant (at the very least, passive-aggressiveness is beaten out of men and assertiveness beaten into us in a way that doesn't occur with women ... if a man is passive-aggressive, he's taught he has to learn to be assertive ... and anyway, he had to so learn in order to be successful, e.g., in the dating-scene ... whereas women are largely never so forced, either by parents or by circumstance to learn how to be assertive if they are not naturally assertive < / Nice Guy (TM) rant >), they know how to be so with deftness that people who are not so socialized don't know how to be.
Indeed, I can think of two men offhand who are both, in their own way, overbearing and arrogant. One is well accepted in his social sphere and the other isn't. Why? The well-accepted one is very deft about his overbearingness and is able to make it into part of his charm. The other is also nervous in his own skin and seems like he's trying too hard to actually making his overbearingness part of his charm, so he comes off as "George Costanza" and whiney and is not liked.
While I don't discount the role of sexism here, some of the issue is that women and men, for sexist reasons, have been socialized differently ... and because men are largely more likely to have been forced to be confident, they are more confident in their arrogance and come off better when they are obnoxious. An important aspect of this is actually sports ... when I was growing up, girls often participated in sports, but if you were a boy, you had to participate in sports. So while many girls learned the lessons of assertiveness that come from playing (team) sports (and there are many), such learning was far from universal, and many women who even know those lessons felt social pressure to forget them -- what was discouraged in the women via social pressure was not assertiveness per se but rather how to be deftly assertive. OTOH, such lessons were universal for guys and there was no social pressure to forget those lessons ...
I bet you'll see a big change in the next few years as women who've been socialized in a manner more similar to how we've socialized men come of age. Or at least I hope we'll see such a change.
As to the example of Ehrenreich vs. Brooks: that's a class issue, ain't it? Brooks says things with which the managerial class is comfortable. Ehrenreich doesn't. So who do you think gets hired?
Although perhaps women are more likely to say things that truly make the managerial class uncomfortable? Or at least they are less likely to have the credentials (due to past sexism in certain fields like econs) such that the managerial class will end up giving them a platform in spite of their views?
Posted by: DAS | October 25, 2006 at 01:01 PM