At VIDA: Kevin Prufer and Erika Jo Brown Take a Look at the Numbers

At VIDA (an organization dedicated to promoting women in literary arts) Erika Jo Brown and Kevin Prufer, University of Houston PhD Candidate and Professor, respectively, sat down and tallied the amount of male and female faculty at Poets & Writers 2012 list of "Top 50 MFA Programs.") The results are somewhat grim, yet, helpfully contextualized by Brown and Prufer. Check it out! From VIDA:

A graduate PhD student and a tenured professor walk into a coffee shop—sounds like the beginning of a hackneyed joke. Instead, it's the catalyst for an experiment on the state of gender in creative writing academia.

The semester was in full swing, and we'd agreed to meet to discuss a small curricular matter. But our conversation wandered from poetry to gossip, then from gossip to the state of the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program. The students, we agreed, seemed happy with the professors and the professors happy with the students. The environment was indubitably supportive, sociable, and aesthetically diverse.

Though the glaring problem, we agreed, was gender parity, especially in the poetry program.

Due to a perfect storm of recent hiring and faculty departures, UH became a large MFA/PhD program with a poetry faculty that was 80% male. To make things stickier, a quick count revealed that our graduate student body in poetry writing is about 60% female. Despite pleading the case to university higher-ups, there was little chance that we were going to be able to fix things soon.

Of course, Houston is hardly the only school with this problem. For the past few years, Erika’s MFA alma mater has had zero female poetry professors on its faculty, and both could name other prominent programs with similar problems. Was this just a run of bad luck or symptomatic of a pattern of inequality?

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Others have published studies on gender parity in English departments or the humanities in general. But what, we wondered, was the ratio of male to female professors across the discipline of creative writing? How did it break down by rank and genre?

We were pretty sure that a couple evenings of work could confirm what we suspected—that gender parity is a discipline-wide problem.

We started with the 2012 Poets & Writers list of “Top 50” MFA programs, certainly a flawed study, but a solid test sample from which we could gather data. This way, our information would come directly from the public face of each university (i.e. what they report on their own websites).

Along the way, we discovered all sorts of complications. Some programs didn’t list ranks; some departmental websites seemed almost purposely obfuscating, implying unreasonably large faculties that, after a few clicks, were revealed to be padded with adjuncts, part-timers, visiting professors, and temporary writers-in-residence. Ultimately, we managed to shake out a good sample of 45 programs that clearly communicated their faculty profiles.

Tallying by genre also proved complicated. We looked into past and present course offerings, but how could we really count someone who had written seven novels and a book of poems? What about the many, mostly younger, faculty working in unclassifiable, hybrid genres?

Head to VIDA see the results!