UPDATE: The results of this study are now available as an infographic.
Introduction
This study began with a question.
For a long time, we’ve admired the work of VIDA. Transparency leads to progress. We cannot improve without first identifying problematic trends. does a great job of calling attention to these trends in literary publishing as they pertain to gender equality.
What percentage of work that a magazine publishes is written by men? What percentage by women? How many books reviewed are written by men? How many by women?
VIDA asks these important questions.
What we wanted to know: what happens when we ask similar questions about magazine editors who decide what to publish and who to review?
So we we started counting editors, and we hope the results are valuable and provide a benchmark upon which we can measure change in the literary community.
Methodology
1) We began with a list of literary magazines and journals that either:
a) Would be attending the
b) Appeared on
c) Were included in the
In total, we counted 499 magazines of all shapes and sizes. Small. Large. New. Old. If the publication appeared on one of these lists, we added it to our count.
2) We then visited the website of every magazine on the list and noted whether the Editor-in-Chief or Editor was male or female.
When a publication also included a Publisher on the masthead we counted the Editor-in-Chief – unless there was no Editor-in-Chief underneath the Publisher, in which case we counted the Publisher.
If a publication had Co-Editor-in-Chiefs, both male, we counted that publication as male. If they were both female, we counted that publication as female. Any combinations of 1 and 1 or 2 and 1, etc… were counted as both.
Findings
The results of our survey are, depending on how you sort the date, both surprising and unsurprising.
Among all magazines we counted, men and women have nearly equal representation in the top spot on the masthead — 47% male, 46% female, and 7% both.
We were encouraged to discover that women lead 53% of magazines attending AWP. Men occupy the top position at only 41% of publications, while 6% have co-editors or editorial teams.
However, when we begin to separate publications based on reputation the numbers shift decidedly in favor of men.
We used three lists to gauge reputation:
1) The itself.
2) The .
3) The list of top literary journals.
The percentage of males holding the position of Editor-in-Chief for these publications is decidedly higher – around 60% or more in all three cases.
Conclusions
What do these numbers mean?
Unlike the VIDA count, these numbers are unlikely to change year to year. Editors do turn over quite often at university-run literary magazines, but at the top publications the position tends to be held by one person for a longer period of time.
We don’t want to make any grandiose conclusions about gender and power in the literary community.
We’d prefer that the numbers just exist, and would rather find out what you think about them. They didn’t surprise us. Do they surprise you?
