The 2015 VIDA Count

VIDA’s survey of gender bias in literary reviewing was published last week. You can find piles of infographics and some analysis here.

The basic message is “more of the same”. A few magazines — notably Harper’s and The New Republic — have made significant improvements. Granta continues to score well. But magazines such as the Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books and The London Review of Books continue to be bastions of the Patriarchy.

This year for the first time VIDA choose to look at a range of other identities that intersect with that of woman. They surveyed ethnicity, sexuality, ability and gender identity (although the report in The Guardian carefully omitted any mention of gender identity because we wouldn’t want to think that VIDA was no-platforming anyone, would we?). Inevitably the numbers were fairly depressing, but beyond that there’s not much we can say until we have new data next year to make comparisons. My congratulations to Poetry and Tin House, both of which managed more than 0.5% of bylines by trans women.