Late To The Party

Maureen Dowd is strangely behind the curve in taking on the why so few women on the editorial page? question. And, as Ezra Klein says, she near-totally drops the ball with a self-indulgent column. People think her columns are mean because her criticisms, while often witty, are strangely un-substantive like she's just, you know, being mean to people. Since the dawn of Bushery, I suppose many liberals have joined me in finding this to be not-so-bad an approach, but if you recall her coverage of the Clinton years the method was essentially the same and endlessly pissed me off. Just saying cutting things about whoever happens to be in the public eye at the moment is a kind of toxic cynicism, not sharp social criticism.

Worse, though, there's a real issue in this neighborhood that Dowd ends up neglected. Not, primarily, an issue of not-quite-A-list pundits getting discriminated against by the High And Mighty Gods of Opinion Journalism but a dearth of women doing A-list punditry that merely reflects and reproduces a gender imbalance that exists far down the totem poll (it's noticeable even from my ground floor view) and distorts the public debate in various ways. The world works in such a way that the women working in the field at less-prestigious levels don't really have the capacity to address the issues in play in print, since to advance their own careers they need to be on the good side of the responsible parties. Men are unlikely to care deeply about this issue or devote their time and attention to it. So if anyone's going to write about the problems women face as they try to work their way up the ladder, it's people in Dowd's position -- people who aren't risking anything by casting a critical eye on the structure of the profession -- who are going to have to do it.