Steve Poole blogs about Publishers Weekly‘s oddly womenless top ten best books of 2009 to note a particular phrase of speech, as is his wont. What niggled at me was his last paragraph:
If you make a list of your favourite books of the year and then notice that they are all written by men, should you remove some of the books and insert some written by women? If you don’t do so, are you “ignoring gender” or “excluding women”?
Then it struck me. What this paragraph does is to create a contrast between the spontaneous act of listing your favourite books of the years and the artificial act of genderbalancing it. It presupposes both that the original list would be the “real” one, reflecting the genuine tastes of the PW editors and unsullied by other concerns, while the adjusted list would have phonies on it, books only chosen because they written by women. Not that Steve meant it that way of course, but it is the sort of assumption that’s always in the background of this kind of gender (or any other kind of) equality discussions. It both ignores the reality of how a list like this is created and denigrates gender balancing such a list as inauthentic.