The year in sports (got your attention!)

Since making the decision that French grad school - yes - seemed a better bet if I was going to be a self-supporting adult then did journalism, I have not given the field as much thought as I did way back when. (Still think I made the right choice! Just this morning I paid for my very own pain au chocolat that I ate at an outside table at Le Boulanger des Invalides while writing the diss...) But I've been semi-paying attention to the recent debates about why girl-journalists are so underrepresented. And I'll admit to having read Conor's list of top non-fiction essays of the past year in that light. Not knowing the gender of the writers mentioned who go by initials, I did not Google them all to get to a final count, but we're not looking at 50-50. Of the six he lists as "bloggers of the year," things are definitively not 50-50. 100-0, all six being dudes.

These are, Conor explains, his "personal picks," and I don't think we're obligated, in our personal reading, to reach demographic utopia ala elite college admissions committees. (Elderly or long-dead Jewish men are so very, very overrepresented in my own book-reading, young female grad students and academics in my blog-reading.) That the list appears not on a personal blog but in the Atlantic, with its six male bloggers to one female, does, however, change the context. It's now both a list of general-interest recommendations and one that tells readers, if you read these, you can hold your head up high.

What I noticed, in looking at the list, was that the question of whether more men than women cover Real News and the opinion field closest to it - the way this is always framed, as in, not enough women are following/confident in their opinions about the news - was kind of irrelevant. More to the point was the inclusion of sports (in the article and blog section) and the exclusion of fashion (again, not an issue if this is how an individual's reading tilts, but we're left with the impression that one is serious-person-acceptable, the other not). The "Food" category seemed like it might make up for that somewhat, but we get nothing to do with gender, women-in-kitchen-or-not, body-image, who actually does the farmers'-market shopping, etc. This is both an individual's list - subjective in a way that's interesting and a good thing - and a man's list, which is where things get more complicated.

While the list is in no way intended as a representation of what Journalism values these days, and is indeed the opinion of one journalist, I think it's fairly consistent with what is and is not viewed as important in the field. And, to reiterate, the issue is not even whether we have as many women as men out there with profound and informed thoughts on whether Pakistan knew. (I, for one, can't help you here.) It's that the fluff that gets covered under the banner of Acceptable Diversion tends to be the kind of fluff smart men follow, whereas the fluff even really, really smart women keep track of is defined as just too silly to be put in respectable publications.