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WE'RE LOOKING
FOR WOMEN
NIGEL EATON, EDITOR
IT WAS WHILE READING DENISE MATTIA's fascinating article about resort diving in Brazil that I decided to do a quick tot-up.
The article was Denise's second in the space of six months. But was it, I pondered, part of a dwindling resource? Were we seeing fewer articles in Diver being written by women divers? OK, Louise Trewavas writes a column in every issue, and the magazine she edits, Dive Girl, is now part of the Diver Group, with most of its content written by women. But what of Diver itself?
So, beginning with all the Diver magazines in the year 2001, I started counting. I found 10 articles by female contributors.
The range of subjects was broad. There were, for instance, features on Jean-Michel Cousteau and snorkelling with humpback whales by Tally Pozzoli, war graves and getting fit by Louise, and diving with killer squid by Jacquie Cozens. But did this body of work represent a fair helping, bearing in mind the number of active women divers?
Calculating that women represent roughly 20 per cent of the diving population, and that Diver carries about 10 main articles per issue, there seemed to be a deficit. According to my figures, women divers were under-represented in the year by a factor of two.
Surprised, I wondered if 2001 was typical. So I checked back through magazines published five and 10 years earlier.
In 1996 I found a total of six articles by five female writers. Subjects included diving in Australia and in the Alps, cave-diving, and an account of an attack by a hippo during a dive in an African lake. In 1991 there were five articles, covering UK dive sites, marine biology, treasure wrecks and underwater science.
So, no downward spiral. On the contrary, my quick assessment suggested that there had been fewer articles by women in the past (though only slightly so, bearing in mind that there were fewer pages in the magazine, and probably fewer women divers). Overall, however, a definite case of under-exposure.
Why should this be so? Assuming that Diver doesn't discourage input from female divers (which, of course, we don't), and recognising that women have a fairly high profile in the diving world generally, it seems a bit of a mystery.
Perhaps an awareness of this shortfall might prompt women divers to put themselves in the picture a bit more often. Or could it be that they are just too busy diving to be bothered with photographing it and writing about it?
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