the problem we're writing toward
The Challenge.
Women have always written. They have not always been read, reviewed, or believed at the same rate as men. GLOW exists because the page is still not a level one — and the earlier a girl learns that her voice matters, the harder it is to talk her out of it.
01 — Who gets reviewed
Literary publishing still skews male.
Since 2009, the nonprofit VIDA: Women in Literary Arts has counted bylines and books reviewed at major literary magazines and review pages. Year after year, the VIDA Count has documented that flagship outlets — including The New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books, Harper's, and The Times Literary Supplement — review more books by men and publish more men as critics than women, often by a wide margin.
↳ JSTOR Daily — Gender Disparity and Book Reviews: the VIDA Count
02 — Who tells the news
Most of the news is still reported by men.
The Women's Media Center tracks bylines, on-air reporters, and wire credits across the U.S. media. Its Divided 2021 study found that men produced roughly 6 in 10 of the news Americans read, watched, and listened to across print, internet, TV, and wires — a gap that has barely moved in a decade.
↳ Women's Media Center — Divided 2021: The Media Gender Gap
↳ Women's Media Center — Status of Women in U.S. Media 2021 (110-study review)
03 — How writing is judged
The same words are scored differently when a woman signs them.
In 1968, psychologist Philip Goldberg showed students identical academic essays — half attributed to "John T. McKay," half to "Joan T. McKay." The "John" essays were rated as more competent and persuasive than the exact same essays signed by "Joan." Decades of replications and extensions, including peer-reviewed work in Sex Roles and incentivized lab experiments published in European Economic Review, have repeatedly found gendered author-name effects on how writing is evaluated.
↳ Paludi & Strayer (1985), "What’s in an author’s name?" — Sex Roles
↳ Kaschak (1981) / Goldberg revisited — Sex Roles
↳ Krawczyk (2017), Author's gender affects rating of academic articles — European Economic Review
↳ Kapelner & Weinberg (2019), Do Readers Judge Books by Author Gender? — Socius
04 — How a sentence sounds
Female writers are read as 'tentative.' Male writers are read as 'direct.'
Linguistic research on workplace email and computer-mediated communication finds that the same hedges, softeners, and politeness markers ("just," "I think," "sorry to bother") are interpreted as warmth from a male author and uncertainty from a female one. A study of the Clinton email corpus and a body of experimental work in Language and Social Psychology show that gender — not the words on the page — shifts how readers rate the writer's competence and authority.
↳ Peterson, Burke & Welles (2018), Politeness at Work in the Clinton Email Corpus — Corpus Pragmatics
↳ Ma & Atwell Seate (2017), Tentative Language in Emails — Journal of Language and Social Psychology
So what do we do about it?
We start early. We give girls a place to write the awkward draft, the brave second one, and the one that finally sounds like them — and we publish their words, by name, with no apology in front of them. The research is clear about the headwinds. GLOW is the tailwind.
Citations link to the original peer-reviewed papers, organizational reports, or reputable secondary coverage. Last reviewed May 2026.