I don't recall anyone saying anything about a conspiracy or did I miss something? It's the status quo and these are hard to change as those in it defend their territory. And yes guys do tend to hang out with guys, and the social aspect has a bearing on the professional one. My unwilling participation in the sexual politics in editing a women's anthology is part of the infuriating part, since it is the challengers to it who are deemed to have a political agenda, whereas the status quo has one too, implicitly. I don't have time or space here to condense what I wrote in a 20 page essay, but it addresses so many of things being said here....
In doing this anthology and addressing the clear gender imbalance in "men's" anthologies (in all but name, a lot of the time) the aim is not to create a separate space but to call attention to the bias in so-called mixed anthologies. Furthermore and infuriatingly, space given to women's work somehow assumes that gender is her only subject, for example in the critical book I think I mentioned in which the (male) editors scrupulously had a section devoted to women writers, but whereas the male section included poems on politics and all kinds of subjects, the women's poems were all about.... being a woman. I mean, I don't write on women's subjects. Come to that, I have many other causes than this one I'd love to spend my time on but this does seem an important issue. Part of the problem is that it isn't seen as equally important to men which does lead one to think that some feel threatened, as was said here elsewhere.
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