"Wot's the matter with being sexy?": More New Yorker Number-Crunching
Ruth Davis Konigsberg, you’ve got company: the ladies at Miss Grace’s Salon are giving the kids from Math Club a run for their money and crunching New Yorker bylines somethin’ fierce. The result? Grace founder and author Elizabeth Merrick counted up all the New Yorker articles in 2004 (702) and logged how many of them were written by women (147), or 21%. See pretty chart above. Merrick does note, happily, that the fiction odds have vastly improved since editor Deborah Treisman has come aboard: a whopping 43% of fiction authors were women in 2004.
A quick peek at today’s New Yorker reveals similar stats: a big feature by Margaret Talbot and a TOTT by Scooter Libby literary expert Lauren Collins, a poem by Elizabeth Bishop and – yay! – fiction by Canadian Alice Munro; 4 out of 21. Otherwise it’s all Hershy and Hertzbergish, Paumgartenesque, Denby-riffic and McGrath-tastic. Which of course are all wonderful things, but the mag might just McCall for a few more chicks, especially those who are so skilled in elegant wordplay. I’m just sayin’.
GRACE GIVES THANKS TO DEBORAH TREISMAN OF THE NEW YORKER [Miss Grace’s Salon]
Remedial Math [Miss Grace’s Salon]
Earlier:
Pitch it, ladies, your time has come! [FishbowlNY]
