I Spent Two Years Trying to Fix the Gender Imbalance in My Stories - Ed Yong, The Atlantic
▻https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/i-spent-two-years-trying-to-fix-the-gender-imbalance-in-my-stories/552404
Crucially, I tracked how I was doing in a simple spreadsheet. I can’t overstate the importance of that: It is a vaccine against self-delusion. It prevents me from wrongly believing that all is well. I’ve been doing this for two years now. Four months after I started, the proportion of women who have a voice in my stories hit 50 percent, and has stayed roughly there ever since, varying between 42 and 61 percent from month to month. And of the 312 stories I’ve written in that two-year window, only 7 percent feature no female voices. (This figure excludes the small number of stories that feature no voices of any gender.)
For the first year, I also tracked the number of people whom I asked for an interview, to check if I was actually contacting men and women in equal numbers and simply receiving a skewed set of replies. That wasn’t the case: In early 2016, women accounted for just 30 percent of people whom I contacted. As the year went on, I found that I would need to contact around 1.3 men to get one male quote, and around 1.6 women to get one female one. There are probably several reasons for this.
