Wow. Heather Mallick takes on Harper’s editor Roger D. Hodge, whose very name actually screams STODGY GIT, over the fact that Harper’s never has female contributors. Not seldom, pretty much never. Hodge mumbles about how he just prints the best writing regardless of gender, and how he doesn’t want to pander to minorities who “can give birth.”

Along the way, Mallick provides some chilling statistics:

Last year, an American website, www.WomenTK.com, began tracking the ratio of male to female writers in Harper’s, The Atlantic, The NYT Magazine, The New Yorker and Vanity Fair. Arguably, the ratio should be more or less one to one because that’s what life is like. As it turned out:

• Vanity Fair 2.7:1.
• The New Yorker 4.1:1.
• The Atlantic 3.6:1.
• Harper’s 6.9:1 (118 male bylines, only 17 female). Fully six of its 12 issues from September ‘05 to August ‘06 had one or no female writers.

And, as Mallick points out, these magazines are boring. They’re not intellectual or in-depth or clever. They’re just dull and self-satisfied. The last time I read either Harper’s or the Atlantic (I forget which) it was serializing a novel by J. Robert Lennon that featured mangled prose, one-note characters and a flimsy premise. Do you think there could be some connection between the boringness and the fact that they’re edited by someone whose name is literally Stodgy Git?