"Rachel Sklar has made it her personal mission to make sure that good work by women in media does not go unnoticed."
I am very, very proud of that descriptor. The full Gelf interview with me is here.I’m not a hater at all, and granted I asphyxiated inside this bubble a long time ago, but most and maybe all of these women are far from overlooked or underrated. Many have (or have had) great, prestigious jobs, and/or are very well known and successful for their work on the job or off. Or is the idea that they’re overlooked and underrated because they’re women, relative to men in similar positions? I dunno, seems like missed opportunity to talk up ladies who aren’t already blogged all over the walls hereabouts.
The first trap in having a panel about women being overlooked will always be the claim that if they’re so overlooked, how could you find such great people for the panel? I tried to be clear in the interview that I wasn’t saying women were overlooked as a WHOLE in media, but PROPORTIONALLY. This was about the next step - you’ve got your one or two women on your power list, or on your panel, or at your conference. Why are we so conditioned to think that’s enough?
It’s not. It shouldn’t be, both quantitatively and qualitatively. I used as an examplel the website Women TK, now defunct but available through the magic of the WayBack Machine, which tracked the byline ratios of men to women in the big general-interest magazines (New Yorker, Atlantic, Vanity Fair etc.) and found it very much out of whack (though the ratio at the website’s end, 3:1, was an improvement over the ratio when founder Ruth Konigsberg started it, which was 4:1. Though Harper’s, which started at 4:1, ended up at 6.9:1).
Also raised on the panel: The quality of work assigned to/undertaken by women. Anna Holmes pointed out that entry-level jobs in women’s pubs were frankly easier to get - she tried! - and Jessica Grose noted the greater rewards for women who wrote about themselves, personally (Rebecca Traister made this point, too, writing about Emily Gould’s NYT mag cover; Ruth Davis Konigsberg makes it on Women TK (“what women are allowed to write about”).
I also turned it around and asked about why women seem less willing to step up, to put themselves out there (my own impression based on anecdotal evidence of trying to recruit people to HuffPo and Mediaite, of seeing who showed up for the completely open Big Business Breakfast, Alex Leo, HuffPo’s (female) comedy editor explaining to my huff about only 5 of “50 Funny People on Twitter” that she looked, and a lot of women comics are just not on Twitter). So we talked about that, too.
And finally, it was far from a “missed opportunity to talk up ladies who aren’t already blogged all over the walls hereabouts” - not only in the interview linked above, which included a long, non-exhaustive list of names, but on the panel, whom I asked to come each with a name of someone they thought was overlooked/underrated/deserving of a shout-out.
I am guessing, though, Chris, that you are responding to the quote above and didn’t read the interview, because the pull-quote up top would have assuaged some of these concerns: “This panel isn’t about ‘why women can’t make it in media’—they can. And have. It’s more about why the proportions are still out of whack.” Click through to the interview next time! Granted, it’s with me, but I rather liked it.
Anyhow! Here is the Panel Nerds write up on it and the video should be up soon. I loved the panel and was beyond thrilled not only with my smart, insightful panelists but with the very sharp audience (the girl who asked our thoughts on Maureen Dowd prefaced it with, “This might be a dumb question, but…” - it was an awesome question and led to fabulously spirited debate).
So, no. Not a missed opportunity.
