Tag Archives: gender equality

For One Year, This Publisher Will Only Release #Books By #Women | HuffPost #publishing #genderequality

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In 2014, only 27 percent of authors represented in The Times Literary Supplement were women, only 40 percent from The Paris Review, only 29 percent from The Nation. These numbers are courtesy of the annual VIDA count, an effort to shed light on gender inequity in the Western literary world.

Although the count, in its fifth year, has promoted positive change — The New York Times has steadily upped its coverage of women, and writer Joanna Walsh declared 2014 the Year of Reading Women as a result — there is still much ground to cover, as the above statistics only begin to indicate. Books about women still don’t win major prizes; books by women are still likely to be packaged as unserious.

To begin to address these discrepancies, author Kamila Shamsie published “a provocation” in the Guardian this month: Let 2018, the centennial anniversary of women’s suffrage in the U.K., be a Year of Publishing Women.

READ MORE: For One Year, This Publisher Will Only Release Books By Women | HuffPost

Let’s Stop Shaming Little Boys Who Read About Girls | BookRiot #books #kids #sexism #genderequality

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At the link the author further recommends in the article 23 books about girls for little boys to read. Great post!

I recently took my infant son to a gathering where he played happily on the floor, the center of attention in a ring of adults who were all interacting with and admiring him.  Then I mentioned that his new favorite toy is bright pink. The men in the circle chuckled awkwardly and exchanged glances, and then someone joked: “so does that mean he’s gay?” I see this kind of gender policing happening so often, so early, for little boys.

In a related issue, when Nicola Griffith posted her astonishing data showing that books about women don’t win awards, it begged the question: why don’t men seem to care about women’s stories? Why don’t judging panels value the experiences of women? And yet I’ve heard this offhanded sentiment from friends of mine who are men: “I guess it’s a pretty good story — even though it’s about a girl.”

The root of the problem, I believe, isn’t simply that men don’t care about women or can’t imagine women’s experiences. It’s that they are actively shamed — even as infants! — when they show interest in anything perceived as “girly” or as a compromise to their masculinity. They’re not supposed to like pink, or dolls, or dresses, or princesses, or stories about girls. They hear it first from their caregivers and authority figures, and then from each other once they’ve internalized the message. READ MORE: Let’s Stop Shaming Little Boys Who Read About Girls | BookRiot

▶ Code Like A Girl | BuzzFeed #coding #girls #genderequality

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▶ Code Like A Girl | BuzzFeed | YouTube.

16 On-Point Responses from Female Scientists to Nobel Winner’s Sexist Comments | Mashable #distractinglysexy #STEM

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READ MORE 16 on-point responses from female scientists to Nobel winner’s sexist comments | Mashable

These Female #Writers Want To Stop “Chick Lit” Being Used To Describe Work By #Women | BuzzFeed #books #diversity #genderequality

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Bestselling novelist Marian Keyes recently called the term “chick lit” derogatory, and now other female writers are expressing how much they dislike the term. READ MORE: These Female Writers Want To Stop “Chick Lit” Being Used To Describe Work By Women | BuzzFeed

Novelist Finds That #Books About #Women Don’t Win Major #Awards | Jezebel #sexism #genderequality

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We already knew that publishing is hard for women. VIDA’s annual count is a persistent reminder that, while the gender gap in publishing has begun to close, it’s still far from approaching equality.

But novelist Nicola Griffith had a feeling that it just wasn’t women writers that were underrepresented; books about women were absent as well. “I’ve been counting, subconsciously then consciously, for 20 years when I was first published and started to see how skewed the playing field was,” Griffith told Fusion. So Griffith gathered the data, and published it on her blog last week.

She found that regardless of the gender of the author, major awards overwhelming favored books about men and boys. READ MORE: Novelist Finds That Books About Women Don’t Win Major Awards | Jezebel