It went up last Thursday evening, but by early Friday morning there were already a dozen comments about the Slate article that proved the predominance of book reviews in favor of male authors in The New York Times. There it is, in empirical black and white: "Of the 545 books reviewed between June 29, 2008 and Aug. 27, 2010: —338 were written by men (62 percent of the total) —207 were written by women (38 percent of the total) Of the 101 books that received two reviews (both the Book Review and a ROP review) in that period: —72 were written by men (71 percent) —29 were written by women (29 percent) What does this tell us? These overall numbers pretty well line up with what other studies have found: Men are reviewed in the Times far more often than women. As for the double reviews, men seem to get them twice as often as women. " The argument, at least in the Big Print of Huffington Post, a host of Internet stories, and the little print of Twitter, was ramped up a few weeks ago, amid the Jonathan Franzen hoopla, when Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Weiner brazenly suggested that his attention was evidence of yet another "white man" stealing all the oxygen in the cultural conversation about contemporary fiction. They made many valid points, and a number of those points certainly can be seen to illuminate prejudice, or at least suggest the way the culture (and I'd suggest it's not just The New York Times, but all of us) view and value the work of women. To continue reading: http://dianemeier.com/index.php/style/womens_worth/