Does my gender affect my success?

It would be wonderful, more than a decade into the 21^st Century, to be able to answer this question in the negative, but recent figures released by VIDA demonstrate that one is much more likely to feature in the most respected literary journals if you are a man.  For many of us women, this is not exactly news.  My sister bought me a year’s subscription to the London Review of Books once and it began to dawn on me that, week after week, the two poem slots were invariably filled by men.   And then, that most of the reviews were by men, reviewing books by men. I became so irritated by this that my response to the LRB’s arrival became, rather than reading the articles, to skim the contents page for the one or two books or reviews written by women, read those parts only, and furnish the guinea pig cage with the rest.  After 12 months in which not a single poem by a member of my sex was featured, I wrote a letter of protest to the poetry editor, and let my subscription lapse.  There are many fine female poets out there, after all. And many fine female novelists, and reviewers, failing to grace the LRB’s pages.

VIDA’s pie charts present the issue very clearly: with the “right” reproductive equipment in your trousers, you are more likely to have your book reviewed, and you are more likely to be reviewing books.   And it is not only literary journals that demonstrate this imbalance. The short-lists for major literary prizes continue to be dominated by men.  Yet those attending creative writing classes are predominantly – and on some courses exclusively – women.  So what is going on?

There’s unconscious bias of course.  And even the more conscious sort.  An editor at the TLS was quoted in the Guardian as saying, in defence of his publication’s figures:

“I’m not too appalled by our figure, as I’d be very surprised if the authorship of published books was 50/50. And while women are heavy readers, we know they are heavy readers of the kind of fiction that is not likely to be reviewed in the pages of the TLS. The TLS is only interested in getting the best reviews of the most important books.”

The assumptions here are breath-taking.  Despite making up a majority of the reading public, women are perceived as reading and writing the kind of books that are “not important”, and nor do they write the “best” reviews.   It doesn’t help, of course, that our culture deems “important” those subjects that men are often more interested in.   Or that the majority of editors are male, and often relate better to the work of male writers.

But there is more to it than this.  As those commenting on the VIDA website have pointed out, how many submissions to the top literary magazines are from women? When I challenged the (female) poetry editor of the London Review of Books on the paper’s dismal under-representation of women, she said very few women submit. Of course that is somewhat of a vicious circle: the LRB appears so male dominated that many women will simply decide it is not worth a try, and would no more send a hopeful submission there than they would deliberately walk into a gents’ toilet.

So –  a certain amount of unconscious bias aside – is there any truth in the idea that women are excluding themselves?  It is an inescapable fact that the higher up the “kudos” scale one goes, the fewer women make an appearance.    Beginners’ creative writing classes are often exclusively female.  Even BA and MA creative writing courses boast far more female students than male.   In the “first rung” publications, like New Writer, the majority of writers published are women. Further along the career path, in the less intimidating literary magazines such as Magma, numbers are about equal.  But when it comes to the big prize short lists and the top literary journals: Granta, the LRB and the TLS – you will find women vastly outnumbered by men.

Michael Mackmin, the editor of The Rialto, told me a few years ago that although he stipulates a submission of 4-6 poems, women often send less, whereas men send 6, and sometimes more.  Women more often give up after the first or second return of their material, where as men re-submit frequently, and with confidence, until they are eventually accepted.  He says it often takes multiple submissions for him to get a taste for a person’s work, and anyone who doesn’t re-submit (i.e. women more often than men) will not have the chance to win him over.

So are VIDAs figures evidence of a horribly sexist literary establishment?  Or evidence instead that women are more likely than men to undervalue themselves, underestimate their talents, and to sabotage themselves?    Do women give up more easily than men because it hard to continue believing in oneself, through writing’s long apprenticeship, in a society where writing tends to be seen as a noble calling for men, and a hobby for women?  Or because they find it so much harder than their male peers to put themselves forward, when as girls they were often chastised for any signs of ambition, where boys were encouraged?    I suggest that women themselves bear a significant responsibility for their own exclusion from the higher echelons of the literary establishment, often not even trying to penetrate it in order to save themselves the pain of failure, and letting themselves be more easily defeated than their male counterparts in a business where tenacity is a far more important attribute than talent.  I know, because I have been guilty of the same behaviour.

There is little any of us can do – at least in the short term – about society, other people’s assumptions, the preponderance of male editors, or which subjects feel important to us. What we can change are our self-imposed limitations, our fear of putting ourselves forward, our fear of rejection, and our ingrained lack of entitlement.  Women writers, even more than most male writers, would benefit from working on their psyches as well as their writing.   The free mindtools EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) and PSTEC (Percussive Suggestion Technique) now make this work relatively easy.   If you dream of being a writer for whom gender simply isn’t an issue, you may need to reprogram your brain.  Women writers, I suggest, should start now.

Tags: belief in your writing, self-belief, self-promotion, self-sabotage, writers mindset, writers psyche