Silent Femmes: it's not really discrimination that keeps women off the op-ed pages. It's women themselves.

• Author: Sullivan, Amy

Oh, come on, said Susan Estrich. For years, the University of Southern California law professor and former Democratic operative had tracked gender imbalance on the op-ed pages of her hometown newspaper, the Los Angeles Times, and she recently lobbied its newly installed editorial page editor Michael Kinsley to feature more female writers. Now, it seemed, the paper was taunting her. The headline on the opinion section one Sunday in mid-February asked, "Where are the great women thinkers?," while the accompanying piece by conservative writer Charlotte Allen--by turns obnoxious and thought-provoking--argued that the ranks of female public intellectuals had been thinned by feminism. This was not exactly what Estrich had in mind when she asked the paper to correct the nearly 4-to-1 ratio between male- and female-authored opinion pieces.

The cartoon version of Estrich would have had plumes of smoke billowing out her ears as she fired off an intemperate email to Kinsley, giving him "ONE MORE CHANCE" to deal with the issue. The email was soon followed by a letter to the editor, circulated to several dozen southern California women for their signatures, asking them to help fight "blatant sex discrimination at the Los Angeles Times," and then forwarded to Kinsley. "I tried ... to be nice. I said: Please publish the letter," Estrich later protested in her syndicated column. "Please publish this, I said, or I'll have to send it to Matt Drudge"

A brazen threat is not most people's idea of "nice," and Kinsley, accusing Estrich of blackmail, refused to run the letter. So, as promised, she sent it--and their email correspondence--to Drudge and several other journalists, and the situation only deteriorated further.

Although the Times' gender ratio has not improved since the kerfuffle started, Kinsley--in a case of either odd timing or retaliation--found space to publish two op-eds by Estrich's ex-husband, an associate dean at USC's Annenberg School for Communication. Most appallingly, Estrich charged that Parkinson's disease has impaired Kinsley's judgment and ability to do his job.

As fascinating and unseemly as the spat has been, it has ultimately clouded more than it has revealed. Estrich was right about one thing: There simply aren't many recognized opinion-makers who are women. Gender gaps have narrowed in other fields--women have gained ground in computer sciences, math departments, and science labs, and women now constitute the majority of incoming medical school classes. In journalism, too, newsrooms and television studios are filled with more female reporters and--to a lesser extent--editors and producers than ever before.

On the op-ed pages of major newspapers, however, the number of female columnists is roughly that of 25 years ago. Political magazines--with the notable exceptions of The Nation and Salon--are run, edited, and written by men (indeed, the masthead of our own magazine, which has launched some of the sharpest pens in journalism, includes only four female names in the list of 36 former editors; that's 11 percent.) Even in that brave new democratizing world of blogs, the professional bloggers all have names like Mickey and Eric and Andrew and Josh.

As a female editor at a political opinion magazine, I've bucked this trend, but I've also worried about the absence of women's voices in my field. With a paltry 10 to 20 percent of opinion pieces in major newspapers written by women, surely editorial page editors could improve their percentages without lowering their standards. Is it the case, however,--as Estrich's righteous, old-style-feminist "let us in the door!" cry would have it--that the problem is mainly one of gender bias? When I considered whether to take this job, one of the first questions I...