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The National Magazine Award finalists have been announced, one day after NYU announced the predominantly male 100 most outstanding journalists of the past 100 years. And like NYU's list, the ASME's are pretty male-dominated. Unfortunately, it shouldn't come as too much of a surprise that men are taking home the lion's share of the awards in categories like profile writing, feature writing, reporting, and essays and criticism. After all, women's literary organization VIDA crunched the numbers of female vs. male bylines in a range of magazines back in February and found that, yep, by and large, more men than women are published as contributors, "even if," as Megan O'Rourke writes in Slate, "the ratios at literary journals are notably less lopsided than those at more politics and current events-oriented magazines." If, as VIDA put forward, there are more male contributors published than females, by numbers alone it would follow that there'd be more men in the overall pool to draw from for excellent writing.
Ann Friedman has gone another step with the ASME finalists list and counted out the bylines, adding links to the stories and determining how many men versus women have been nominated in each of the categories. She writes, "Women hold their own or dominate in servicey categories (public interest, personal service) and fiction. They are not represented at all in the categories of reporting, feature writing, profile writing, essays and criticism, columns and commentary." The total male/female breakdown: 12 women, 37 men, 1 un-bylined piece.