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This week’s winners in the arts: men

Awards Men News
The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, seen here, might as well change its name to the Rock and Roll Hall of Men (Tom Bake).

It’s awards season. Which means it is again the time of year in which women realize they’ve been snubbed, blocked, ignored, skipped over…however you want to put it, it’s the season in which women are consistently losers to the patriarchy, and this year is no different. Since Sunday, media outlets have been publishing their yearly lament that women directors were, yet again, entirely ignored by the Oscars committee this week. But in addition to the traditional Oscars shutout, there is another honor, announced today, that also has been given almost exclusively to men, historically.

Today, Cleveland's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame announced its 2020 inductees, including one woman—Whitney Houston. But women make up just 8 percent of the hall’s honored musicians. In its 34-year history, just 69 inductees out of 888 were women (2020’s not included), NPR reported. The dearth of women, however, is not due to a lack of talented female musicians. 

“Since the dawn of the recording industry, there have been prominent women, sometimes women who were dominant,” Evelyn McDonnell, who writes about music and teaches journalism at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, told NPR. “Big Mama Thornton sang the original—and to me, still the best—version of ‘Hound Dog,’ and she's never been inducted.”

A committee of around 30 artists, scholars, and record-industry types come up with the hall’s nominees before passing them along to about 1,000 people who vote for the winners. An emeritus professor of Afro-American studies at the University of Wisconsin, Craig Werner, sat on the committee for nearly 20 years. He expressed his exasperation about the gender imbalance to NPR, not mincing his words: “The issues are much more what happens to that ballot once it goes to the larger electorate. Well, I'm just going to say it: I think that the electorate makes dumb decisions on a regular basis.”

At last year’s ceremony, Janet Jackson (who was inducted) could not have been more clear: “Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, please: 2020, induct more women,” she said to a cheering crowd. 

Still, there is one under-sung pocket of equality when it comes to awards and the arts. Both the Hall of Fame and the Oscars would do well to look to an industry where women have been consistently racking up honors: publishing.

“The big literary awards this year have been positively dominated by female writers and—remarkably—this is considered totally unremarkable,” wrote Juliet Lapidos in The Atlantic on Tuesday. “This is the good-news story contradicting persistent gender inequities in, it often seems, every other field.” 

Lapidos pointed to the fact that the National Book Critics Circle's 2019 list is mostly female: “four out of five nominees for Autobiography are women, as are two out of five for Biography, three out of five for Criticism, three out of five for Fiction, two out of five for Nonfiction, and two out of five for Poetry." She goes on to write: “Both winners of the 2019 Booker Prize were women, as were the winners of the National Book Awards for Fiction and Nonfiction. A woman won the 2019 Pulitzer for General Nonfiction, and while the Fiction prize went to a man, a woman was among the two finalists.” 

So while Hollywood and Cleveland still have a serious gender problem, women are running off with the gold when it comes to words. Lapidos offered two potential reasons for this success: Women read more than men, and a number of men appear to have decamped from the literary realm as books become an ever-more-difficult sell. It seems that even in 2020 money, and men, still rule the world.



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Lauren Wolfe
Journalist, editor WMC Climate
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