The best barometer we have of this is the publication rates in op-ed pages of national newspapers. An op-ed, or opinion-editorial, is a short form evidenced based argument on a public topic. Usually it is around 750 words.
Women simply don’t submit these to newspapers with the same regularity as men. At the Washington Post in 2008, nine out of ten submissions came from men and 88 percent of the pieces published were by men. Perhaps because they draw their guests from those pages, 84 percent of the pundits on Sunday morning public affairs television program are men.
In an effort to hone my voice and get heard on those same pages, I recently took a workshop hosted by Catherine Orenstein, founder of the Op-Ed project, a non-profit that has taken on the task of getting more women represented on the opinion pages.
About 20 women assembled in New York early one Saturday, and Catherine asked us each to say what we were expert in. There was much throat clearing and understatement in the group.
As a group we failed to state credentials that included stints at the White House, the Louvre, Goldman Sachs and degrees from Columbia and Johns Hopkins as experiences that made us expert in one area or another. We edited ourselves so as not to seem as though we were “bragging” or too “opinionated.” Orenstein had to drag it out of us.
Not only did we overlook our professional credentials, we also overlooked the power of our personal experiences. When I listed my credentials as a journalist and someone familiar with the links between environment and health, I failed to mention my own powerful story of losing my sister to cancer and my personal battle with pancreatic cancer. I was a survivor with a story writ large; an expert in my own experience with my polluted hometown and the illnesses it created. Orenstein, who studied fairy tales and myth at Harvard, reminded me gently, “A story is a powerful credential.”
