Gender Balance in Boyne Berries

Emerging Writer has an interesting blog entry on the subject of Sexual Imbalance in Poetry Competitions? It made me go and look at the gender balance in the recent issue of Boyne Berries. We published 49 pieces in the magazine, 28 by women, 21 by men. We got submissions from 109 writers, 46 of whom were women. So it appears that we may be slightly imbalanced in favour of women.

We had a team of four Group members (three male one female) who looked at the submissions and advised me (male) on publication or not. These did not know the identity or gender of the writers.

The issue of gender balance seems to me to be a minefield. Are there clearly set out rules? Should the percentage of each gender published reflect the percentage of submissions by that gender? Surely not. Should there be a 50-50 divide in the magazine? Surely not but a regular imbalance on one side or the other would surely indicate that something is wrong.

I seem to remember a recent controversy possibly in the pages of Poetry Review where someone either suggested that only women should review books of poetry by women or complained that books of poetry by women were only being reviewed by women.

It reminds me of a case some time ago when there was a review of gender imbalance and stereotyping in Irish textbooks. One publisher was criticised for having a scene where a father read a goodnight story to his son on the basis that the gender count was males 2, females 0. The publisher responded saying that they were deliberately trying to redress a gender stereotype by having the father read the story. Difficult to get it right.