Bylines and Book Reviews: What a Decade of Data Says About Women in Publishing

Since 2009, a small nonprofit called VIDA: Women in Literary Arts has done something deceptively simple: it counts. Every year, volunteers comb through dozens of major literary magazines and newspapers, tallying who gets published, whose books get reviewed, and who writes the reviews. The resulting numbers — now spanning more than a decade — offer one of the clearest pictures available of gender imbalance in literary publishing.

The Count That Started It All

VIDA was founded after writer Cate Marvin noticed a pattern: acclaimed women writers seemed to go unreviewed while male critics wrote about other men’s books, year after year, in the same handful of prestigious outlets. The organization’s flagship “VIDA Count” now tracks roughly 40 major literary journals and periodicals, breaking down bylines, book reviewers, and books reviewed by gender.

What the Numbers Have Shown

The disparities have, at times, been dramatic. In the 2017 count, The New York Review of Books published work by women in just 23.3% of its bylines — down sharply from 46.9% the year before, illustrating how easily a single publication’s numbers can swing without sustained institutional commitment. The London Review of Books has shown a more consistent pattern: around 22% of bylines, 18% of book reviewers, and 26% of books reviewed went to women, figures that held roughly steady for years.

Some publications have moved the other direction. Tin House regularly ran 60% or more of its content by women before it closed in 2019, and The Paris Review improved from 35% women contributors in 2016 to 42.7% the following year. In 2019, the New York Times Book Review published more than 50% women and nonbinary writers for the first time in a decade the count had been tracking it — a milestone that took ten years of public data pressure to reach.

Progress Isn’t Linear

What the multi-year count makes visible, more than any single year’s numbers, is how fragile progress can be. Individual publications have swung by 15 to 20 percentage points in a single year — in either direction — depending on editorial leadership, without any structural change underneath. A magazine can look like a leader in gender parity one year and fall back into the pattern VIDA was founded to expose the next.

That volatility is itself a finding: representation that depends on which editor happens to be in the chair isn’t the same as an industry that has actually closed the gap. The publications that maintain strong numbers year after year — rather than spiking briefly — tend to be the ones where editorial teams treat parity as a standing policy, not a one-off correction.

Why the Count Still Matters

VIDA’s data only ever covered a slice of the literary landscape — a few dozen “Tier 1” outlets, largely U.S. and U.K.-based, tracking a binary gender count for most of its history before later expanding its categories. But its influence has outpaced its sample size: the count is now cited by editors defending or explaining their numbers, cited in graduate publishing courses, and referenced any time a literary magazine’s staffing or masthead comes under public scrutiny.

The broader lesson echoes what similar data has shown in the visual arts: representation gaps in creative industries rarely close on their own. They close when someone keeps counting, publishes the numbers where editors and institutions have to reckon with them, and makes it uncomfortable to look away.

Sources: VIDA: Women in Literary Arts (VIDA Count, 2013–2019), Publishers Weekly, Forbes, Publishing Perspectives.