A Valentine from the WaPo
Well, you know that in some places around the world, women's rights, interests, and voice have been getting progressively devalued over recent years (while in others they've been becoming progressively more valued.)
In Iraq, I am afraid that women's interests are about to be rolled back by the incoming regime.
And in Washington DC, women's voices have almost certainly been rolled back a lot over the past 10-15 years.
Today, "Valentine's Day", I'm sad to report to you the final findings of the "Women getting WaPo-ed" count that I've been maintaining for the past eight weeks.
Today, the WGW count finally tells us that the men who run the most influential newspaper in the most important city in the world value women's voices precisely one-ninth as much as they value men's voices.
That is, as of today, the WGW count stands at exactly 10%. Over the past eight weeks, precisely 26 of the 260 authored pieces on the Washington Post's op-ed pages have been authored by women. (And I've been "generous" in assigning to the women's score genders that weren't easy to assign.)
I note that people in the west frequently get conniptions when they learn that in some Islamic codes of law, a man's testimony in court "counts" for as much as that of two women.
But how many conniptions do we hear from Washingtonians when they contemplate the gross gender imbalance on the Op-Ed page of their daily paper? Nine men's voices for every woman's voice that gets published?
What is all that about???
It is my strong belief, moreover, that the gender imbalance on the WaPo's op-ed pages has gotten worse over the past 10-15 years, not better. I don't have any figures for that, but if any of you readers has some figures from the past, please send 'em on over!
At least, now, I've established what I hope will be an absolute rock-bottom base-line for the WGW count. I'm sincerely hoping the count will only go up from here? Maybe I'll run it again some time in the future.
But for now, the Valentine's Day message that the men who run the WaPo are sending to the women they encounter in their professional life seems to be this:
- Hey, suckers! We're happy to advertise to you, write gossip columns about you, have you do the leg-work in a number of our reporting assignments... But treat your opinions as something worth paying attention to?
Fuggedaboutit, suckers!
Just keep buying the skimpy lingerie we peddle to you all over our main pages and shut up!"