Keeping Women’s Voices Out, Supposedly Liberal Dood Edition

I went to what I understand to be The American Prospect’s main page today, here.

There seem to be twelve “current” articles. As far as I can tell, ZERO were written by women. Scrolling down the page to the “recent” articles, things are better, but still, zero out of 12 of the “current” articles. Women are completely absent in the list of “most read” articles listed, which is hardly a surprise, given the numbers.

Back at the top of the page, two of the three linked blogs are written by men. There are plenty of posts by women at the third blog, “Tapped” but it hardly balances things out, in my view.

And of course there is Media Matters’ legendary gender imbalance. These ostensibly “liberal” men obviously do not think women are their equals, and they clearly do not “walk the walk.” Carol Jenkins recently noted:

I have spent nearly 40 years in the media. I began my career as a reporter at roughly the time when the US Commission on Civil Rights issued its landmark 1977 report, Window Dressing on the Set. As that study found, women and minorities at the time were mere props in our media, playing no significant part on the air or in management. Thirty years later, despite gains made through early mandated steps toward inclusion, we could write a similar report today.

According to various studies, women hold only 3 per cent of”clout”positions in the media (“The Glass Ceiling Persists,”Annenberg, 2003). Only a quarter of the newsrooms are led by women (Dates 2007, Cramer 2007, Nicholson 2007, Media Management Center), while women hold only a quarter of jobs as syndicated opinion writers at our newspapers (Estrich 2005, Pollitt 2005). Women online are facing the same fate. Across all platforms, women are missing. Women of color are the most invisible of all.

–Ann Bartow