Vida: Women in Literary Arts

VIDA: Women in Literary Arts is an organization based in the United States that "seeks to explore critical and cultural perceptions of writing by women through meaningful conversation and the exchange of ideas among existing and emerging literary communities."

VIDA: Women in Literary Arts was co-founded in 2009 by poets Erin Belieu and Cate Marvin. Belieu and Marvin, because they are both poets and teachers, had been acquainted with one another for some time. However, due to there being a small amount of opportunities for women in the literary community, they perceived themselves as being in competition with one another. That perception changed when Marvin sent Belieu an email detailing how isolated she felt as a female writer, and questioning why there was no feminist conversation happening in literary circles. Belieu then forwarded the email to hundreds of writers, and it received a huge response. Based on that response, Belieu and Marvin decided to co-found VIDA: Women in Literary Arts.

VIDA: Women in Literary Arts is best known for The Count. The Count is a yearly inventory of how many women and men are published in, or have their books reviewed by, notable literary magazines. The Count was first performed, and the results published, in 2010. It showed that significantly lower numbers of women than men had been published or had their books reviewed by notable literary magazines.

The 2010 version of The Count started a large conversation about inequity in the literary world. The comments section below the original publication of The Count shows the widely varied opinions about the relevance of, and reason for, the disparity in the numbers. Some people were not surprised, some were surprised and angered, some were inspired to act, some questioned the validity of the methods used to collect the numbers, and some questioned whether relevant information had been excluded from the numbers.

The conversation surrounding The Count propelled VIDA forward, and it continues to grow in membership and notoriety. Since 2010, VIDA has published a yearly version of The Count. The reactions of the magazines included in The Count are as varied as the comments section below The Count on VIDA's website. Some magazines have ignored the numbers, others have challenged the validity of the numbers, and some have actively tried to address the issue and change it.

Responses to "The Count" have been widely varied, and VIDA's pie charts have been reproduced in many periodicals and journals. The conversation spurred by VIDA's Count has been explained in the Mother Jones article "Where are the Women Writers." [1] Some magazines, such as The Coffin Factory, have openly and bluntly criticized VIDA for The Count, claiming that the questions asked by VIDA, and that the methods used to come to the conclusion that there is gender disparity in the publishing world are flawed. The most common criticism of VIDA's methods is that the numbers don't include information on how many submissions are made to each magazine by men and women respectively. The assertion is that if there is a disparity in the number of submissions by men versus women, then the presence of a disparity between published work by men versus women makes sense and is not evidence of gender bias. VIDA contributor and poet Danielle Pafunda responded to this concern in her article "Why the Submissions Numbers Don't Count." Here, she details seven reasons why submissions numbers are ultimately irrelevant.

...
Wikipedia