ALSO, TO JOIN THE SUBMISSION MISSION GROUP, click HERE.

I'd like to start a writerly movement of sorts. I want every woman writer I know to send out ONE DOZEN SUBMISSIONS THIS MONTH. That gives us two weeks to polish up some work and get our writing into editors' hands. Send out twelve poems or stories, or send out one piece a dozen times. If your work gets rejected, so be it. The point is for as many women as possible to participate in the process not only of writing but also of how literature is made.

Maybe my writing is good enough for Granta or The Paris Review, but I wouldn't know because I admit that I've never submitted to those two journals. I definitely would like to see my work appear in those journals, and I know that it absolutely won't if I don't send them anything. It's as if I've rejected myself from Granta. Jim Berle wonders whether "men are less hesitant to submit work en masse...[and] less afraid of being rejected." He writes, "I get 10 times more work from men than I do from women." You can read his post here: http://thehairpin.com/2011/02/women-get-published-and-reviewed-less-than-men-in-big-magazines-say-red-and-blue-pie-charts/.

I send my work out regularly, though it takes time and I've not prioritized it for a few months now. Overall, I receive more rejections than acceptances, but I do get published in literary journals, ones you've probably heard of and which are pretty darn wonderful. My guess is that women and men write in roughly equal numbers, and I don't think very many people would argue that men are just inherently better writers. So I'm hearing that my male counterpart is sending out more work more often to a wider range of journals and, therefore, literary journals are publishing more work by men.

All this pondering is a response to this week's report from VIDA: Women in Literary Arts. VIDA released its countdown on gender disparity in some of the major periodical publications featuring literary work in 2010. Magazines and journals they pie-charted in red and blue include The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Poetry, and The Threepenny Review. The numbers don't look good for the representation of women authors. You can view the report here: http://vidaweb.org/the-count-2010.

This issue is something about which I've written before, namely in an article published inLegacy called "Is Women's Poetry Passé?: A Call for Conversation." There, I looked at recent gender numbers not only in Poetry but also for major poetry prizes and academic positions. While my statistics are now a little dated, I noted that only 20% of U.S. Poets Laureate had been women and that the percentage was worse after 1960 than before feminism was rollicking. At the time I wrote that article, women had not outnumbered men as National Book Award finalists since 1992. Because many poets are also academics, it's also interesting to note that a 1998 report logged the percentage of female college presidents at 19.3%; in 2004, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that female PhDs earned about 84% of what their male counterparts did; and in 2005-2006, just 19% of full professors were female, even though women were earning more PhDs and had long outnumbered men in baccalaureate degrees.

What these numbers indicate is that gender disparity is a large and complex issue, for which there may be a variety of intersecting explanations. Quotas, of course, are not the answer, and those who respond to the VIDA report by attacking quotas miss that the issue is complicated, that these numbers are an indicator of something larger worth discussing. A Salon piece this week, to Laura Miller's credit, mentions the long-held belief based on anecdotal evidence that men read books by men while women read books by men and women. Even if women outnumber men as readers, as rumor has it they do, that assumption about who reads what--which may well be true and also self-reinforcing--could shape whose work is more likely to get published. And published work is way more likely to be read by more than a couple people. Read the whole Salon piece here: http://www.salon.com/books/laura_miller/2011/02/09/women_literary_publishing.

The editor of Tin House responded to the VIDA report by providing numbers about submissions: unsolicited submissions were roughly equal, but work submitted by agents and work submitted directly to the editor was more often by a male writer. It sounds as ifTin House is talking about gender disparity now. In fact, the end of Rob Spillman's blog post convinced me to start my submission movement. He writes, "Agents of female writers, publishers of female writers, and especially female writers, please send us your work. We really want your work." You can read the entire response here:http://www.tinhouse.com/blog/.

Christopher Wiman at Poetry says the same thing. Men are submitting more, and more poems by men find their way into print at Poetry. The last time he did a formal count, 65% of poem submissions were coming from men. You can read more about Jessa Crispin's conversation with Wiman and her discussion of the larger issue here: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/need-to-know/voices/numbers-dont-lie-addressing-the-gender-gap-in-literary-publishing/7161/.

If you are a woman writer, join me in the submission movement. Send out one dozen submissions by February 28. If you don't have more than a few poems ready or you've finished just a single story or essay, simultaneous submissions are fine. Share this note with your Facebook friends, and tell other women writers you know to submit their work. If there exists gender disparity in literary journal publishing, let it not be because women are not submitting their work.