VIDA is an organization that, according to their mission statement, “seeks to explore critical and cultural perceptions of writing by women.” For those who don’t follow the organization closely, it’s perhaps best known for the VIDA Count—a yearly accounting of how much space is given in major literary journals to women, and how much is given to men.

The VIDA Count is a blunt tool—it doesn’t account for race, sexual orientation, or gender identity—but it is also a powerful one. It is easy to talk in a general way about gender bias in the literary world, but when you see in a simple pie chart that men get the staggering majority of book reviews at The Atlantic, or how few bylines the New York Review of Books gives to women, the issue becomes very real, very quickly.

The 2013 VIDA Count shows that some literary publications have made progress in equal representation, but that for the vast majority of journals and reviews, there’s a lot of progress still to be made.

As I was reviewing this year’s VIDA numbers, I wondered: how does The Stake stack up? We are hardly the kind of outfit that would show up on VIDA’s radar: aside from the obvious matter of size and reputation, the publications VIDA analyzed are more literary, while we lean toward the world of genre fiction. Books are just one category among the many we cover, and to date we’ve only ran a grand total of 9 book reviews.

Still, we can’t just sit back and smugly point the finger at the big lit reviews. To the extent that we cover the literary world, The Stake either uses its platform to promote the work of women, or it doesn’t. We’re either part of the problem, or part of the solution. We write a lot about gender bias in pop culture—do we put our money where our mouth is?

There are two VIDA measures that seem particularly relevant to The Stake: 1) book reviewers and 2) authors reviewed. (The below numbers will include reviews of comics, though I’m counting each series as one review rather than counting each new issue separately.)

On measure #1, we’ve had six people review books for us in the past: myself, Catherine Eaton, and our contributors F.R. Lewis, Levi C. Byers, and review team Anna and Jeff Michler. That’s two-thirds men, one-third women. On measure #1, book reviewers, The Stake has some work to do.

When it comes to reviews, we do a bit better. We’ve got two categories of book reviews: regular reviews of recent titles, and our Backlist series, which looks retrospectively at classic genre works. So far, including the reviews of Kelly Sue DeConnick’s Pretty Deadly comic series (which I’m counting as one review even though multiple issues have been considered on The Stake), we’ve got a total of 6 book reviews—3 of works by male authors, 3 of works by female authors. 50/50, not bad.

In our Backlist series, which is still quite new, we’re at two-thirds and a third again—reviews of works by Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov, plus Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, which kicked off the series. Again, an area where The Stake has some work to do in letting you know about classic genre works by Margaret Millar, Ursula LeGuin, Octavia Butler, Patricia Highsmith, and more.

This would be a good time to mention that The Stake is always open to Submissions. We need your help to push toward ever greater representation of women and men on this blog. Writers, we want to keep hearing from you, regardless of your gender. And publishing companies, please send us great books to review by both women and men.