{"id":2846,"date":"2012-05-15T12:49:12","date_gmt":"2012-05-15T02:49:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stumblingpast.wordpress.com\/?p=2846"},"modified":"2022-08-04T00:24:24","modified_gmt":"2022-08-04T00:24:24","slug":"female-historians-and-book-reviews-in-academic-journals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stumblingpast.com\/2012\/05\/15\/female-historians-and-book-reviews-in-academic-journals\/","title":{"rendered":"Female Historians and Book Reviews in Academic Journals"},"content":{"rendered":"

Female authors do not have as many reviews published as male authors in popular media outlets and are much less likely to be shortlisted for major literary awards as men.\u00a0 Major international newspapers and magazines<\/a> continued to give disproportionate attention to male authors over female authors in their book review columns in 2011.\u00a0 Matthia Dempsey had a look at the review pages of major Australian media outlets and found that a similar trend can be observed here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I haven’t seen a further breakdown of these statistics but I am curious.\u00a0 Are female novelists more susceptible to this treatment than female authors of non-fiction books?\u00a0 I don’t know.\u00a0 While compiling a list of histories and biographies written by women<\/a>, I decided to find out what proportion of book reviews in three Australian academic history journals are of books written by female historians.<\/p>\n

I didn’t expect to find a disproportionate coverage of books written by men in the review columns of these journals as I had not experienced or seen any issues on that front in my time studying history at university.\u00a0 The results of my analysis of two of the history journals did not surprise me.<\/p>\n

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Book reviews published in 2010 and 2011.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This analysis did not detect a gender issue lurking in the book review pages of these academic journals.<\/p>\n

But then I did the same analysis of the book reviews published by another Australian academic history journal.\u00a0 They showed quite a different story:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Books reviewed during 2010 and 2011.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Responses from the Book Review Editors<\/h2>\n

I was flummoxed by the results of my simple analysis of the Australian Journal of Politics and History <\/em>so I e-mailed the editor of the book review pages, Paul Crook.\u00a0 He had a similar reaction to mine:<\/p>\n

I must say, that like you, I was surprised at the figure. I was under the impression that we reviewed loads of books by women writers, just as we have plenty of women contributors and reviewers.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

On the journal’s review policy, he commented:<\/p>\n

\n

Our journal simply reviews books of merit or interest that come within our remit (printed on the inside cover) irrespective of gender, ethnicity or personality.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This sounds similar to the policy of Australian Historical Studies<\/em>. \u00a0The review editors of this journal, Katie Holmes, Tiffany Shellam and Bart Zino, explained to me in an e-mail:<\/p>\n

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[T]o date we haven\u2019t monitored the percentages of reviews by female historians and we haven\u2019t had a policy on it. It\u2019s a worthy debate to have however, and we will endeavour to monitor our journal\u2019s output more closely. We would be very hesitant however to impose quotas on reviews which would be likely to impede the editors\u2019 freedom to engage with the areas of dynamic and emerging scholarship that we might like to raise.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This response raises the difficult question of maintaining high academic standards while attending to equality issues.\u00a0 I don’t think it would be appropriate to lower standards in an attempt to increase the participation of various groups on the pages of an academic journal.\u00a0 That work should be done through the education and mentoring process that academics go through.\u00a0 However, while the book reviews in Australian Historical Studies<\/em> are slightly weighted in favour of male authors, I don’t believe that it is something to be overly concerned about.<\/p>\n

Zora Simic described some of her work as book reviews editor for History Australia<\/em>:<\/p>\n

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[A]s a female, and indeed feminist historian myself I always notice when a new work is published by a female historian, and want to get it reviewed if I can. Sometimes this involves contacting publishers directly if they have not yet sent me an important work of history written by a female historian.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Yet History Australia<\/em> seems to have had a similar approach to this issue as the other journals with respect to a formal policy on gender in the reviews section.\u00a0 Zora Simic was not aware of History Australia<\/em> having a policy to maintain the gender balance in their reviews pages in the past and said that “it would be too difficult to enforce” if there was such a policy.<\/p>\n

The reviews editors at both History Australia<\/em> and Australian Historical Studies<\/em> emphasised that practical issues regarding finding a suitably qualified person willing to review a book and the varying length of time that it takes the reviewers to review a book, can play havoc with the balance of reviews in any particular issue.\u00a0 Zora Simic explained:<\/p>\n

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[T]he review process \u2013 finding a reviewer, waiting for the review, editing the review \u2013 is different in academic journals to say the reviews pages of a major newspaper. We offer no payment, and there is no publication recognition so people basically do reviews as an act of good academic citizenship, and out of their own interest. Whatever care I may take (and I do) to ensure a spread of topics, books by male and female historians etc, the eight of nine reviews that end up in the journal in any given edition are rather random \u2013 i.e. a mix of those you submitted reviews when requested and those who were late.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It was for this reason that I decided to analyse all reviews published over a two-year period.\u00a0 I was concerned that over a short period the figures may produce spurious results.<\/p>\n

Why is the Australian Journal of Politics and History<\/em> Different to Other Australian History Journals?<\/h2>\n

I am left none the wiser about why the proportion of reviews of books written by women would be so different in the Australian Journal of Politics and History <\/em>to the other academic journals I analysed. There are a number of possible reasons:<\/p>\n