Publishers Weekly goofed when it published its Top Ten Books of 2009 and failed to include any books by women. "We ignored gender and genre and who had the buzz" wrote Louisa Ermelino. "We gave fair chance to the 'big' books of the year, but made them stand on their own two feet. It disturbed us when we were done that our list was all male."

I was tempted to launch into a diatribe about how men always manage to elbow their way to the top, even in professions dominated by women. But I'll leave that to the sociologists.

Instead I'll just say that it was a boneheaded move on the part of PW. Didn't they think we'd notice? Didn't they think we'd care?

They gave no criteria for their choices. Were they picking books they enjoyed? Books they predicted would be best-sellers? Books with impact? Books that reflected the zeitgeist of 2009?

And they gave no process. Was it a vote? Was it a formalized consensus-building exercise? Were they gathered around a conference table yelling at one another? Did they start with publishers who bought the biggest ads? Was payola involved? Come on, give us a glimpse into the back rooms where the wheels of institutionalized biases grind on.

Institutional biases are a kind of group-think where the folks in charge proudly assert that they are color-blind and gender-blind. They are unaware of the lenses through which they see the world. Whatever process PW used, it clearly didn't assure multiple perspectives.

So all we've learned from this is that PW is (gasp) just another tool of the old America.