The volunteer organization VIDA: Women in Literary Arts has released their fifth annual 2014 VIDA Count, a report on gender disparity in the publishing world that counts "book reviewers, books reviewed, and journalistic bylines." The report includes periodicals such as Tin House.
Tin House received continued praise, as women "are getting 60 percent and 53 percent, respectively" for book reviewers and by-lines.
The 2014 Larger Literary Landscape VIDA Count accounts for literary journals, such as The Missouri Review, where women overall outnumbered men in contributions.
Magazines like The New Republic, whose results last year looked more like they were from 1964, was cited as an example of progress. The number of female book reviewers has gone up by 22% since 2013.
Literary journal McSweeney's was another example of a publication nearing equality. Women comprised 48% of their writers for 2014.
VIDA also announced the first annual 2014 Women of Color VIDA Count. While the results for this count are "incomplete," VIDA's executive director Amy King noted that the results raised important questions.
Any good faith effort towards identifying the factors that create awareness begins, not with accusations, but with questions. That is why we are presenting the overall results of this first attempt towards recognizing our historical system of racial inequality and how that might bear out in the world of publishing: Our efforts to complete this study - and the new methodology we used - raised many questions worth sharing towards developing discussion around bias in the publishing world and inspiring awareness as this count evolves.