Dear Readers and Writers,
First of all, I want to thank all the people who have sent me excellent samples of their writing as a response to our call for new Monday Magazine columnists. I had promised that I would announce the names of the new people who will be writing for us today but, after doing some thinking and talking to various colleagues and friends, I am not going to do that and here’s the reason: among the approximately 40 excellent people who have applied, there is not a single woman. This is very strange and nothing like it has ever happened before at 3QD. While we do not follow anything like quotas and basically make our decisions based on the quality of the pieces submitted, this complete lack of women applicants is so anomalous that it has caused me to think hard about what we might be doing to discourage women from applying. I have spoken to a couple of experts on diversity in hiring about this and even ran the text of my initial call for writers through an AI-based program which tries to identify language which might not appeal to certain groups of people (based on a deep-learning analysis of several hundred million job descriptions and responses to them) but it had little criticism of what I had written and even diagnosed my writing as “slightly feminine”.
One woman whom I asked for advice said to me that, “Sometimes the problem is not what you say but what you don’t say”. This struck me as sensible and so I would like to open up the window for submissions for another 5 days to everyone again after saying this:
We would certainly love for our pool of writers to reflect the diversity of our readers in every way, including gender, age, ethnicity, race, sexual orientation, etc., and we encourage people of all kinds to apply. And we like unusual voices and varied viewpoints. So please send us something. What have you got to lose?
The new deadline for submissions is 11:59 pm, Friday, July 20, 2018 (New York Time). Please click here for details of what to send if you want to write for us. I now plan to announce whom we’ll be taking next Monday, July 23, 2018. Sorry about the delay.
Best wishes,
Abbas