I talked to Katha Pollitt last week for her Double X piece on the byline gender gap:

Ann Friedman, who used to be the managing editor of Alternet, has written shrewdly about her successful efforts to publish women there. Alternet has a policy that at least two out of the five daily pieces featured on the home page had to be by women. As she wrote in her piece "The Byline Gender Gap" in 2006, "Things will never change, unless magazines make a specific commitment to raising the number of women who appear in their pages." Friedman explained that she set aside time to seek out pieces and blogs by women, kept a physical (not mental) list of possibles, reached out to women one by one and offered actual assignments—vague invitations to submit something sometime wouldn't cut it. Without such conscious efforts, she argued, the daily press of business means you just go back to the same old reliables and the same old perspectives. She suggested that editors who say they'd like to have more women writers but just can't find them commit to spending 20 minutes a week looking for them.

Yes, we need to be encouraging women to pitch more and to be more persistent about getting published. But to be a freelance writer is to be in a constant job negotiation ... and we all know how women fare in that situation, even (especially?) when they are tough. The solution is to pressure editors -- especially editors who say they care about the lack of diversity on their tables of contents -- to commit to solving this problem by devoting their time and energy to it. Lamenting the lack of pitches they get from women and people of color is not enough. I want action! I want editors to make a concrete commitment to setting aside time to seek out new voices. And not just blast emailing a list of writers who aren't white men. I mean actively thinking of assignments for and reaching out to new, diverse writers, one on one. As I said to Katha, I think that if every editor did this for just 20 minutes a week it would have a profound impact on the pale, male, staleness of bylines in most thought-leader publications.

Today I'll be talking about this on CBC Radio with Mother Jones editor Clara Jeffery, editor John Macfarlane of The Walrus, and Gail Cohen, editorial director of Canadian Lawyer. The segment will air on Sunday Edition.