The Debate Over the “Underrepresentation” of Women Opinion Writers:

Dahlia Lithwick (Slate) has an excellent piece on the subject, as does Anne Applebaum (thanks to InstaPundit for the latter link). Here’s a particularly interesting excerpt:

There are at least a dozen ways to parse and think through the acknowledged underrepresentation of women opinion writers, and yet — to the extent that we are having a national conversation on the topic — it is a conversation so far almost wholly lacking the voices of men. . . . The smartest male columnists in the country . . . are not willing to turn that massive store of their brainpower to the equally hard issue of what an opinion page is meant to represent; whether the gender discrepancy here is due to prejudice, socialization, or innate differences between men and women, or some combination thereof; and whether, beyond the crude tools of affirmative action, there is any useful remedy.

Perhaps male columnists are just not interested in this issue because it doesn’t represent the sort of “hard news” they’re used to commenting on. More likely, they are terrified to opine on the debate because the inquiry is so fraught with the possibility of career-terminating levels of politically correct blowback — a la Larry Summers — that they deem it better to hold their tongues and wait for the storm to pass. Imagine a man writing, as Dowd just did, that women want to be “liked” whereas men don’t care. I can already smell their scorched Dockers. . . . Imagine a man writing, as did Applebaum, that this is all a storm in a teacup; the sort of trivial bean-counting that is insulting and degrading to women. (Clarence Thomas is routinely characterized as beyond loathsome for making that argument against affirmative action.)

And so a clutch of women are left on the pink margins of the page, to wring our hands and, well, discuss among ourselves. The subtext will thus remain that anyone choosing to speak out on this is somehow hysterical or overemotional; that this is not a “serious” problem since serious people (i.e., men) aren’t addressing it. All of which practically guarantees that nothing will be done about defining, measuring, or redressing the issue in the long term. . . .