Tuesday’s elections were quite remarkable as they related to gender. In Virginia, of 15 male incumbents who lost their re-election bids, 11 of those legislative seats were won by women. One winner was a transgender woman whose opponent was an avowed homophobic.
In New Jersey, a female candidate won her race against a male incumbent who was publicly patronizing about the Women’s March. Charlotte, N.C., elected its first African-American female mayor. Manchester, N.H., elected its first female mayor. Topeka, Kan., and Santa Barbara, Calif., elected their first Latina mayors. Seattle elected a lesbian mayor.
In journalism, the three Washington bureau chiefs (from the New York Times, the Associated Press and USA Today) who participated in a recent panel discussion were all women. I have now become actively involved in political groups led by, and whose participants almost exclusively are, women learning how to make our voices heard.
What a surprise, then, when I realized that there is a huge lack of women’s voices being represented in the Chicago Tribune’s Letters to the Editor section. I collected the letters pages on random days over two months, September and November. During that time, there were 98 letters published. Of those, 77 letters were written by men, but only 21 were written by women. One day had seven male writers and zero females. Another had six male writers and only one female writer.
Does this mean that women don’t write letters? Does this mean that the Tribune has a particular slant it wants to convey? Does this mean that issues written about, by women, are not seen as important as those written about, by men? Are men better writers than women?
Whatever the reasons, I hope that, as demonstrated in the recent elections, more women begin to speak up!
— Marjorie Rogasner, Evanston
