Sunday, March 11, 2012

Questions, After the 2011 VIDA Count

Does the gender of the readership of a publication affect the gender of its bylines?

Do women primarily read work by women? Do men only read work by men?

What does it mean to write about "women's issues" or "men's issues"?

What about writers who don't identify as male or female? Where is their pie slice?

What if female writers were to gang up and publicly pledge to submit to a publication? Submission bombing, if you will.

What if a submissions system (i.e.: Submittable) collected submitters' demographic data that could later be made available to the editors, perhaps anonymously, after submissions close?

That's what's on my mind. What questions do you have? 

4 comments:

Kristine Ong Muslim said...

Laura, these questions are dead on and very perceptive! Thank you.

Molly Spencer said...

My question is: do men submit more than women? I think I remember this being a component of the discussion after the 2010 count -- the publishers of these magazines saying that the majority of submissions are from men, so naturally a higher percentage of publications are. If true, why is this? I have my theories, but it would be interesting to *really* know why. BTW, I love your idea of the gals "ganging up."

Laura E. Davis said...

well, I actually have these numbers for the latest Weave issue reading. I will post them soon. Our submission percentages are definitely not the same as our acceptance percentages. For issue 07, we skew toward accepting pieces by women 2 to 1. I'm working on the data for issue 06. It's interesting info.

Molly Spencer said...

Yay Weave!