Lee Kottner wrote to the New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus about the fact that the NYTBR reviews fiction by both men and women, but only non-fiction by men:

The year’s 100 best books illustrates this all too well. The list is just about evenly divided in fiction and poetry, but in the non-fiction list, the numbers are heavily weighted toward men.

Tanenhaus responded on the “ask the editor” forum, pointing out that three out of five “preview editors” at the NYTBR are women, and two of those deal with non-fiction. Plus the NYTBR’s first-ever staff writer is a woman. But there’s just a shortage of woman who write about “hard” subjects, Tanenhaus says:

The truth, at least as far as we can tell, is that there remain areas in which women authors tend to be less well (that is, less numerously) represented than men: science, philosophy, economics, politics, public policy, foreign policy, to name some obvious ones. And it’s not easy to find women reviewers in these areas, either, as I remember very well from my days as an editor on The Times’s Op-Ed page. The top two editors at the section at the time were women (Katy Roberts and Mary Suh, both still at the paper), and as a department we often lamented our difficulty in finding women keen to write on many of the “hard news” subjects we covered.

Kottner responds with several lists of recent science books by women, including her own favorites. (And she mentions She’s Such A Geek, the book Annalee and I co-edited. Yay!). She ends up by saying that women have a hard enough time being taken seriously as scientists that it’s even harder for us to gain credibility as explainers of science.

Tanenhaus’ response does make me wonder, though: are he and other editors really desperate to find the female Tom Friedman or the female Jared Diamond? Is there a frantic search going on for these people? If so, how does somebody go about occupying that niche?