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Are Marginalized Writers Truly Represented in Publications?

Dr. Patricia Farrell
4 min readAug 22, 2022

Some publications are giving it the old college try and attempting to be more inclusive of writers they believe have been failed by many publications, but are they fooling themselves?

Photo by Green Chameleon on Unsplash

Marginalized writers seem to be the current crusade for publications wishing to reach out and right the wrongs that have existed in literature for decades, if not centuries. Even the famously popular Wikipedia has been accused of engaging in marginalizing writers — this time, it's the women writers.

The woman who wrote the piece said, "I'm writing entries about celebrated female figures to make male-dominated online spaces more inclusive." As she notes in the article, "between 84–91% of editors are men" in Wikipedia and "83% of biographies on Wikipedia are about men."

Putting the Wikipedia content into better context, I include the following excerpt from The Guardian article:

Miriam Griffin, classicist and tutor at the University of Oxford (1967–2002), was only mentioned on her husband's page. Similarly for Annie Ure, the first curator of the Ure Museum, University of Reading, a position she held for 54 years. Google her, and the most you got was a page shared with Percy Ure. Professor Leslie Brubaker and Professor Gillian Clark were detailed as the wives of their notable husbands

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Dr. Patricia Farrell
Dr. Patricia Farrell

Written by Dr. Patricia Farrell

Dr. Farrell is a psychologist, consultant, author, and member of SAG/AFTRA, interested in flash fiction writing (http://bitly.ws/S94e) and health.

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