Academic

The Op-Ed Project

By Ann Bartow

Katharine Mieszkowski at Salon writes:

Here’s a dismal fact: There are fewer female bylines on the Op-Ed pages of the nation’s major newspapers, as a percentage, than there are women serving in the U.S. Senate, according to Bob Sommer, a Rutgers University public policy researcher, who has studied the issue and calls the gender disparity “astonishing.”

Yet, while some of us spill a lot of words lamenting how few female bylines appear on the Op-Ed pages, Catherine Orenstein, founder of the Op-Ed Project, has actually done something about it.

You may remember reading about the Op-Ed Project in the New York Times early last year. Today’s San Francisco Chronicle has an update. Back in 2005, inspired by the fiery debate about the dearth of women publishing opinion pieces, Orenstein, a contributor to the New York Times Op-Ed page and fellow with the Woodhull Institute for Ethical Leadership, conceived of a class to teach opinion writing to women. Since then, she has trained 1,500, with about 150 students a month now taking the course. From Orenstein’s first class with 12 students, 12 pieces have been published. And since 2005, 50 Op-Eds have been published in national publications by women trained in the class.

Read the rest here.

(NB: the first two paragraphs above are actually one paragraph at Salon but posting them that way here crashed Wordpress for some odd reason.)

Full post as published by Feminist Law Professors on July 01, 2008 (boomark / email).