An Introduction by KR Editor, David Lynn:
Earlier this year VIDA: Women in Literary Arts published an interesting study on gender identity and published writers, featuring statistics regarding literary publications such as The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, Harpers, and many others. It made quite a splash–as VIDA pointed out, “numbers don’t lie,” and most of these magazines have been publishing male authors to a significantly skewed degree. Neither The Kenyon Review nor KROnline were included in the original article, however, and we were curious. What follows here is a study and short article by one of the remarkable KR Associates, Colleen Damerell. I am grateful for all her work. I think you’ll find it interesting.
Personally, I am pleased, though far from smug, that KR and KRO publish roughly equal numbers of female and male authors. We’ve learned by counting that we do have some work to do, particularly with nonfiction and translations. Let me be clear, however, that we have no particular quota for gender or, for that matter, other measures of diversity. Rather, I and the other editors believe that excellence is best represented–best celebrated–in diverse voices, forms, genres, and cultures. Issue by issue, in print and online, that’s the excellence for which I’d like KR and KRO to be known.
Adding it up
By Colleen Damerell
“We know women write. We know women read. It’s time to begin asking why the . . . numbers don’t reflect those facts with any equity. Many have already begun speculating; more articles and groups are pointing out what our findings suggest: the numbers of articles and reviews simply don’t reflect how many women are actually writing.”
–Amy King, on the 2010 Count from VIDA: Women in the Literary Arts
I collected each contributor’s gender from their respective bios. Most contributors used pronouns in their bios, and if contributors did not, I searched the internet for other bios. I’ve labeled the final counts “men” and “women,” though they might be more appropriately labeled “he” and “she” to reflect my process–gender identities are fluid and often complicated, and I don’t mean to put any contributors in a box by giving them one of two labels.
When gathering information by genre, I went by the contents list. So, if a contributor published both an original poem and an original work of nonfiction, or published an original work and a translation, that contributor would count once in each category (contributors with multiple poems in an issue still counted once for poetry). A contributor with work in more than one genre per issue would be counted twice in the total for that issue. The labels “Women” and “Men” are kind of misleading; given my method, the final count is really the total number of works by women and the total number of works by men.
Contributors who published in more than one print issue were counted more than once in the grand total (counted once, or even twice, for each issue of the journal in which the contributor appears). Translated works were not counted in their respective genres–it is hard to categorize a poem or a group of poems written, say, by a man and translated by two women, since all of these people have contributed to the writing that appears on the page. All translated works, and their translators, were counted separately in the “Translated Writers” and “Translators” categories. Reviewers were counted among the contributors, but the works and authors they review were not. A tally of reviewed authors was kept separately–it’s good to know whose work KR and KRO are giving critical attention.
Winners of the Patricia Grodd Poetry Prize for Young Writers and the Short Fiction Contest were included in counts for original poetry and fiction. The winners of these contests have historically been almost always female, and the results affect the statistics.
Pieces that appeared in both the print journal and KRO were counted in both places, since the readership varies between them. Note that the graphic below includes statistics from both KR and KRO since 2008.
Grey boxes indicate the majority in each category. Men have the majority in almost every category. Fiction is significantly skewed toward women, while nonfiction is significantly skewed toward men. Both KR and KRO feature more reviews of books by men than by women. Poetry is nearly even. The number of translated writers is even (3-3) for KRO; the score is an uneven 2-16 for print.