SUSAN ESTRICH

RELEASE: FRIDAY, MARCH 18, 2005, AND THEREAFTER

MICHAEL KINSLEY AND ME

           How an e-mail exchange between two former classmates became a
war of words, rumor and innuendo is not clear. But here's what is clear:
Were it not for the controversy that erupted between us, the cause of gender
diversity on opinion pages would never have gotten so much attention.
Hopefully, that attention will bring much-needed change.

           Depending on the day or the paper, three or four of the columns
you read on the typical opinion page are likely to be written by a man, and
if you're lucky, one by a woman. If you add the cartoon, which is almost
always by a man, you can get to five or six opinions by men and one by a
woman.

           Now certainly women aren't a monolith, but to exclude half of
the population from a page intended to represent diverse voices in the
community seems plainly wrong. This is not a liberal-conservative issue: Ann
Coulter told me not long ago that she couldn't get into an American paper
large enough to be included in Lexis-Nexis.

           This is a longstanding problem, which my students at USC Law
School and I have been collecting data about for some years. Alicia Mundy
wrote about the underrepresentation of women at The New York Times in Editor
& Publisher a decade ago; in February of this year, there were no women at
all on the op-ed page of The New York Times on 12 of 28 days, or nearly half
the month. Former Washington Post ombudsman Geneva Overholser, one of the
most respected women in journalism, pointedly wrote about the issue, as
well. For the first nine weeks of 2005, according to The Washington Post's
own Howard Kurtz, 90 percent of the articles on the op-ed page of that paper
were by men.

           Two years ago, I was one of the leaders of an effort to protect
the one female news columnist at the Los Angeles Times, when there was a
proposal to downgrade her column -- and we provided our results to Tribune
leaders then. Only one of six New York Times columnists is a woman -- even
so, and even including the one woman news columnist who was finally moved
from the inside of the metro section to the op-ed page, in January of this
year, before we began our current effort, The New York Times still printed a
slightly higher percentage of women (16 percent) than the Los Angeles Times
(14.3 percent), which is hardly much to crow about. Since Feb. 14, when we
began public scrutiny at the Los Angeles Times, the percentage of women on
their op-ed page has increased 10 percent.

           With a new round of attention to what everyone acknowledges is a
real gap comes the question whether those who are in a position to do
something about it will recognize the need to do more than simply keep an
eye out for a few good women, as everyone promises, and has been promising
for years, to absolutely no avail.

           People rarely sit down these days and say, let's not call any
women. Mostly, they call everyone they know -- who happen to be the people
they went to school with, played sports with, worked with in the past.
Friends call old friends. Men call men. Editors call other editors, or other
columnists, people who are already members of their club. They'll ask, "What
would be great?" and the answer will be a page that looks like us.

           At my first Harvard Law School faculty meeting more than 20
years ago, I listened as my very senior colleagues -- those I respected most
in the world -- described the ideal young recruit. Each described himself.

           Unconscious discrimination produces pages that are 80 percent
and 90 percent and sometimes even 100 percent male from people who feel
annoyed at those who force them to confront the fact that what feels like
neutral decision-making isn't. And since the other newspapers look just
alike, they would probably pay no attention were there not some other
controversy.

           In this case, the controversy became Estrich vs. Kinsley. It was
not what I intended. I started out trying to get a letter to the editor
published and ended up in a public battle. My favorite was the suggestion
that I would lead a campaign against a newspaper to get my own column run by
that newspaper, a suggestion that would be comical if it weren't so
revealing.

           I have a greater goal. The numbers speak for themselves. They
can't be avoided. My reward will come when I pick up the paper someday and
see memorable columns by smart women who say they've never been the victims
of discrimination.

           One of them may be my daughter. Or yours.

           To find out more about Susan Estrich, and read features by other
Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web
page at www.creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2005 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.