Note that what I’m measuring here are people who submitted once, were rejected, and never submitted again. Those numbers are included in the total number of writers rejected above. As a percentage of their own groups, women are less likely to come back after a rejection than men are, if you take the numbers on their face: 21/60 is 35% while 14/32 is 43.75%. But these are such small numbers that one or two people more would make a difference, so I’m leery of drawing a conclusion.

Relatedly:

• Discussion about gender parity in publishing at the Poets & Writers Speakeasy.
• “A Literary Glass Ceiling?: Why magazines aren’t reviewing more female writers. by Ruth Franklin at The New Republic. Money quote: “Only one of the houses we investigated—the boutique Penguin imprint Riverhead—came close to parity, with 55 percent of its books by men and 45 percent by women. Random House came in second, with 37 percent by women. It was downhill from there, with three publishers scoring around 30 percent—Norton, Little Brown, and Harper—and the rest 25 percent and below, including the elite literary houses Knopf (23 percent) and FSG (21 percent). Harvard University Press, the sole academic press we considered, came in at just 15 percent.”
• Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting released a study in August 2010 on the ethnic and gender breakdown of reviews in the New York Times Book Review and the C-SPAN

Other periodicals posting submission and/or rejection statistics (please leave a comment with a link if you see any more):

• Poetry responds to the original VIDA article: amongst other things, they say, “One difficulty is that we receive many more submissions from men: the last count, done last year, was 65% men and 35% women.”
• Strange Horizons 2010 Fiction Roundup: “30-43% of the stories were by female authors; 57-70% by male authors; the ranges are because 13% were by authors of unknown-to-me gender. (All those numbers are almost identical to the past two years.) There were also at least two stories by authors who don’t fit that binary gender distinction.”
• The Southern Review: Overall work published and work submitted were both 40% female and 60% male.
• VIDA Counts The Rumpus: This is most interesting for the comments at the end.

This is the tool I used to make the above pretty pie charts.

But I’ve been doing a lot of reading in my off time, of:

• John Ajvide Lindqvist’s Let the Right One In, although my copy is called Let Me In, which makes me kind of sad because it’s not a very distinctive title and I don’t speak Swedish but Låt den rätte komma in is obviously closer to Let the Right One In than Let Me In, although I wonder if there’s a pun about rats there too.
• Some more American Lit List stuff. Alan also let me use four of his Audible credits, so I got Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, Edward P. Jones’ The Known World and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated, which will allow me to finally start on the online audio Yale course, “The American Novel Since 1945,” which I plan to do on my commute. It’s only like 2.6 days worth of audio when you include the books I haven’t already read, no big deal, right?
• “Lily,” a short story by Emily Gilman.
• The short stories at The December Lights Project. My favourite so far is “Queen of the Kitchen” by Karen Healey, but they’re all good, and they’re updating weekdaily.
• The food blogs that “Queen of the Kitchen” inspired me to start reading again (or for the first time) including my brilliant pastry chef friend Courtney’s Bipolar Baking, Cheap Healthy Good, Very Serious member Edana’s Yum Food and one she recommended called Closet Cooking, and Kath Eats Real Food, which my friend Waye had linked to and where I found out about overnight oatmeal, which I have eaten every day this week (made with just milk, though, because I think yogurt is kind of vile) and which is filling and delicious. I am looking forward to trying her banana oatmeal brûlée, maybe this weekend if I have any wherewithal left.

I get weird comment spam sometimes. This morning I got this, from a website selling cars: “You know an odd feeling? Sitting on the toilet eating a chocolate candy bar.” Ew.