The time to write!

While taking time to devote to writing is not exclusively a woman's problem, there are rather urgent reasons why we need to consciously support women in the arts. Consider these facts, from A Room Of Her Own Foundation:

• Only 9 out of 52 winners of the National Book Award for Fiction are women.
• Only 11 out of 48 winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction have been women.
• Generations of students studied art history with a text that did not include one woman artist—Mary Cassatt, Georgia O’Keeffe, Louise Nevelson and Lee Krasner were all excluded.
• Women writers won 63 percent of the awards but less than 30 percent of the money in awards and grants reported by Poets & Writers. (January/February 2003 issue)
• In 2002 all but one of the Pulitzer Prize finalists for Fiction and Poetry were male.
• 94 percent of all the writing awards at the Oscars have gone to men.
• Of the major artists represented by major New York galleries, only 16 percent are women.
• Only 25 percent of the advisory members of the National Endowment for the Arts are women.
• A recent study by the Coalition of Women’s Arts Organizations showed that in all one-person shows for living artists in American museums, only 2 percent of the featured artists were women.
• A 1992 study showed that only 17 percent of artists in galleries nationally were women, whereas the Bureau of Labor indicated that 48 percent of professional American artists were women.
• 51 percent of all visual artists are female and women hold 53 percent of art degrees, but 80 percent of art faculty members are male.
• 68 percent of total art income in the U.S. goes to men and 73 percent of all grants and fellowships in the arts go to men.