Or maybe it’s that we’re not quite as equal as we like to think we are. My colleague Meghan O’Rourke wistfully comments in Slate that “writing isn’t a field historically dominated by men, like theoretical physics … and one might reasonably have assumed that since feminism’s second wave, matters had roughly evened out.” In fact, it’s the rare profession in which the numbers are even. According to a fact sheet published last year by the AFL-CIO’s Department for Professional Employees, in 2008, women constituted 32.4 percent of all lawyers and 32.2 percent of physicians and surgeons. (We’re 68.8 percent of psychologists, 92 percent of nurses, and 50.4 percent of technical writers, the only type of writer included in the report.) Granted, many important numbers have already increased: The proportion of women in law school has gone up from 3.7 percent in 1963 to nearly 50 percent in 2007-08, and women also account for nearly 50 percent of med school students. Yet, while we may have come a long way, in many areas we’re still catching up.
