Meet the New Girls' Club, Same as the Old Boys' Club

Dan beat me to the punch in writing about yesterday's New York Times story about Catherine Orenstein's op-ed classes, which are directed primarily at women and started up in the wake of a controversy about the small number of women who write and place op-eds and columns.  Similar discussions about the disproportionate number of men who write law-blogs have erupted from time to time on our site and elsewhere.  I confess I found the story more depressing than anything else.  I will concede the gender imbalance, and concede too that it is a problem, although neither the Times piece nor Orenstein have all that much to say here about how and why it occurs.  But I found excerpts like these saddening:

Ms. Orenstein asked: Could every woman at the large rectangular table name one specific subject that she is an expert in and say why? . . . Of the next four women who spoke, three started with a qualification or apology. “I’m really too young to be an expert in anything,” said Caitlin Petre, 23.

“Let’s stop,” Ms. Orenstein said. “It happens in every single session I do with women, and it’s never happened with men.” Women tend to back away from “what we know and why we know it,” she said.

Next she asked the participants why they thought it important to write op-ed articles. Women shouted: “Change the world,” “shape public debate,” “offer a new perspective,” “influence public policy.”

“You are all such do-gooders,” Ms. Orenstein said laughing, “I love this.” She then proceeded to create another kind of list that included fame, money, offers of books, television series and jobs.

The Rev. Dr. Katherine Hancock Ragsdale, an Episcopal priest and the executive director of Political Research Associates in Boston, frowned. “It’s not why I do it,” she said.

That, Ms. Orenstein declared, is a typically female response: “I never had a man say, ‘That’s not why I do it.’ ”

“What I want to suggest to you,” she continued, is that the personal and the public interests are not at odds, and “the belief that they are mutually exclusive has kept women out of power.” Don’t you want money, credibility, access to aid in your cause? she asked.

Cristina Page, a spokeswoman for Birth Control Watch in Washington, leaned forward. “I’ve never heard anyone say that before,” she said. “What you’ve just said is so important. It’s liberating.”

Maybe I'm too naive, and that's why stories like these depress me.  But are these really our only choices?  Not to question the prevalence of old-boy networks, but to recreate them -- often more elaborately than the aging networks they are reacting to?  Not to question the ways in which such hierarchies exist and exclude others, but simply to reproduce them with a new cast?  Not to question op-ed writers' lack of actual expertise or their decidedly mixed motives for writing them, but to deride such questions as "typically female" or "do-gooders'" questions?  Orenstein's description of the typical op-ed -- "a lead connected to a news hook, a thesis, three points of evidence, conclusion[,] [a]nd don’t forget the 'to be sure' paragraph in order to pre-empt your opponents’ comeback" -- makes clear the limited and often bankrupt nature of such pieces.  So should we be encouraging the same pap from a different set of pens -- or could we question the entire enterprise instead?  And are not the same reproduction of hierarchy questions, with the same often dispiriting results, at work elsewhere -- FedSoc vs. ACS, Fox vs. Air America, right-wing think tanks and social networks vs. left-wing etc.?

To paraphrase Robert Bolt, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world -- but for page A23 of the Boston Globe?