The nonprofit VIDA: Women in Literary Arts has released its annual VIDA Count, which analyzes gender parity—or imbalance—at literary magazines. While the new report found some bright spots, only two of the 15 major literary magazines analyzed in the main VIDA Count published more women writers than men, and at eight of the 15 publications, pieces by women comprised less than 40% of all articles published.
Among big-name magazines, the survey saw Granta, Poetry, and Tin House at the top in terms of representation for women, with at least 50% of each magazine's published pieces having been written by women last year. The New York Review of Books was the most skewed toward male writers; only 23.3% of pieces published in its pages last year were written by women. Representation at the Paris Review crept up by 8 percentage points last year even as its editor, Lorin Stein, departed the magazine in December following sexual misconduct charges.
The Times Literary Supplement published the greatest number of pieces written by nonbinary writers, though this only accounted for 0.1% of the work they published in 2017, 4 pieces out of 3,748; only 36% of their pieces last year were written by women. Nonbinary writers have the greatest proportion of representation at The New Republic, where they contributed 1.4% of pieces published by the magazine last year.
At small magazines, most surprising was the newly-relaunched Believer, where only 33% of pieces published were written by women, and zero books by women were reviewed. Further takeaways can be found on this chart (an abridged version of which is included here, above) or on VIDA's website.
