Unheard of: Writing remains a male-dominated activity.
Photo: photocase
In addition to the hellish world situation, two things have been particularly bothering me in my work as an editor for the past few months. They concern the gender ratio: Firstly, almost only men want to write for us, and for weeks only male authors fill our schedule; Secondly, I’m dissatisfied with my own output, at most I write a gloss here and there, while I lack any inspiration for long, “real” articles. Feelings of helplessness, weariness and anxiety predominate. Strangely enough – maybe because no one likes to be a statistic? – it took a conversation with my colleague to establish a connection between the two things: the two problems are counterparts of the same thing; In other words: I myself embody the problem that confronts me as an editor from the outside.
I start looking for concrete figures on the status quo on the internet and come across a study by the European Journalism Observatory (EJO) from 2021, which examines the gender ratio in the media for eleven European countries. The unsurprising result first: Across Europe, female journalists (and Flinta* in general, I’m now assuming) are extremely underrepresented, with the strongest patriarchal dominance in the classic print media – and, who would have thought, “the greatest imbalance among authors* inside was found in Germany and Italy.” (Is this perhaps a post-fascist phenomenon? Just throwing it out there as a small, steep thesis. In any case, the Federal Republic is regularly in last place among the OECD countries when it comes to gender ratio in other areas too.)
Journalistic bundling of men
For the media context in this country, this specifically means that 58 percent of print articles were written by men and 16 percent by women, with even more stark inequality in publications like the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung”. Here the proportion of men is a mere 81 percent. The study also found that male journalists “spend a large portion of their time writing about other men,” and the number of photos of men in the media almost triples the number of photos of women. This approach would almost have a certain infantilistic humor if it were not an expression of pure male bundling, which repeatedly produces a simply dangerous reality for those excluded from it.
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No separate data can be found regarding the distribution of authors for left-wing media, but I know from years of always being extremely annoyed that things don’t look much better in our circles – except in queer feminist publications or on “women’s issues” like in this focus of the “nd” for the feminist day of struggle. Here we are dealing with a phenomenon that the writer and communist Gisela Elsner described in the early 1980s. In a harsh polemic against “women’s literature” and differential feminism, which she saw as complicit in sexist exclusion, Elsner writes in her essay “Women Authors in the Literary Ghetto”: “With the unwritten rules that suggest it to women writers, with regard to politics and To practice abstinence from social criticism, which suggests that women who write should do so, and instead of describing larger contexts, merely describe tiny observations, which suggest that women who write should show agreement instead of contradiction and protest, is an attempt to silence authors.”
The EJO study’s statement that only reports from the areas of news, politics and economics were selected fits into this paradigm. Reports on health, art and lifestyle topics such as fashion were left out.” If they were included, the gender ratio would probably have changed again somewhat in favor of non-male authors. The following fact is also interesting in this context: “50 percent of the presenters and correspondents in the weekday evening news during prime time on television (cable and network) are men, 50 percent are women.” In front of the television camera, the gender ratio is suddenly equal, which makes it unrepresentative high proportion of visible women contrasts with male dominance in the actual production of knowledge. Is this the fulfillment of the bourgeois promise of representation? And is there so many female news anchors because the men in the executive suites like to watch women announce what they and their buddies have determined to be news?
To put it polemically, it is possible – but I also know: the problem does not only result from the openly authoritarian, explicit exclusion of authors by cis men. Rather, “the rest of us” are part of it to a certain extent – be it through fitting into a (male-dominated) order, through the willing execution of the bourgeois logic of competition and domination. Or be it because, due to female socialization in the latter, we often don’t trust ourselves to have any real knowledge of a subject or to simply put out and defend theses ourselves. In my work as an editor, this side of things looks like this: While most of the male authors I ask accept, the majority of women and trans people turn me down, often on the grounds that there is no capacity – or supposedly too little Knowledge of the matter. Against this background, the fact that the already abysmal gender ratio in the print media is even poorer in the area of science journalism can also be interpreted as follows: the more an area claims to make general statements about the world, the stronger the male dominance.
About four decades after Gisela Elsner’s anger over the “ghettoization” of women authors, in 2020, the Leipzig authoritarianism study shows why this is not only exclusionary, but also dangerous: “The devaluation and control of women and their subjugation under male hegemony can result in anti-feminist violence, but is already expressed in inconspicuous phenomena, such as the failure to notice the everyday oppression and marginalization of women, the devaluation and separation of the “female sphere”.
Money as a problem and a solution
The diagnosis and countermeasures of those who want to “solve” the problem within capitalism are, by nature, both money-mediated. The online magazine “The Conversation,” for example, writes that the inclusion of women’s voices “could lead to billions in revenue” and that “closing the gender consumption gap could bring in up to $83 billion over the next 10 years.” This is probably also intended to close the gender pay gap, which – for reasons that are rarely discussed anywhere – has proven to be surprisingly persistent.
As the press office of Goethe University Frankfurt recently announced, female employees in Germany will earn “on average less than their male colleagues in 2024, and considerably less. Until March 6th, women would have worked for free – assuming the same monthly wage as men.” The press office informs that the university’s own Institute for Economics, Labor and Social Affairs (IWAK) is now dedicating itself to this problem in two joint events with the Hessian institute Ministry of Labor. This should first be about “equal pay for women in positions in the lower and middle salary segments”, then about “equal pay for highly qualified women on the way to management positions”. You want to take care of everyone, as long as it’s not about labor disputes in your own company – but the matter probably seems so urgent to those in power because it is primarily women in management positions who earn significantly less than their colleagues.
It goes without saying for these people: someone has to earn little in capitalism, and even if the men in leadership positions were comfortable giving up their places in the sun to Flinta*, the vast majority of all people would still be them excluded. In this respect, the entire debate about the gender pay gap is a deeply bourgeois one – and can actually only serve to show the shitty nature of the situation, never as a final demand. But does the same apply to the gender writing gap? I would say no. While the form of wage labor must be abolished along with the form of money, the production of knowledge can be a part of criticism, emancipation and even resistance. Therefore, my call to all authors out there: Write more! And not just for feminist struggle day.
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