Where are Women Writers? (and where is the further research?)

I currently subscribe to Mediabistro.com, a website that publishes various articles and job postings to journalists. From this website, I stumbled across an article titled �Where are the Women Writers?� After reading the Vida studies, Elisa Strauss of Forward.com decided to tackle the problem of diminishing women writers and figure out why there are in fact more male writers. According to this article, �She wrote to the (editors of The New Yorker, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, Harper�s Magazine, and The Atlantic; she received responses from all but the Atlantic�.

The article contains one graph showing that 158 men made up bylines in The Atlantic as opposed to 52 women. Even though you can click on a link in the article that shows more graphs like this, I don't think it presents enough research. The research fails to show more detail like how many staff writers are actually at the newspaper and what topics they are writing about. Although only 52 women made up bylines for The Atlantic, perhaps they made up the front page bylines. Furthermore, perhaps The Atlantic just doesn't happen to have a lot of women interested in writing for them. The research is also pretty bias because they fail to include EVERY major newspaper and magazine; they only include ones that support their argument. The study was not large enough to pass statistical muster, it did not last long enough, and we definitely did not gain the full picture which are key elements in positively assessing a study.

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