I seem to be the resident shit-starter here at LitDrift. So today I’ll quickly follow up on the conversation I launched in earlier posts about gender inequity in the writing profession (read the posts here and here).

Yesterday, Anne Hays wrote a letter to The New Yorker complaining of a gender imbalance in the magazine’s issues and demanding a refund:

I am writing to express my alarm that this is now the second issue of the NYer in a row where only two (tiny) pieces out of your 76 page magazine are written by women.  The January 3rd, 2011 issue features only a Shouts & Murmurs (Patricia Marx) and a poem (Kimberly Johnson).  Every other major piece—the fiction, the profile, and all the main nonfiction pieces—is written by a man.  Every single critic is a male writer.

See Anne’s complete letter on Facebook and read a blog post about this at the Village Voice. I’m very excited to see what comes out of this.

Note: I support this letter-writing campaign fully, as you can tell if you read my earlier posts. The title of this post is irooooonnniiiiiicccccc…