A few days ago, I was reading the comments at Diary of a Crossword Fiend, as I'm wont to do, and commenter Eric H broached the idea of anonymous submissions. Coincidentally, this is something I have been thinking about a little bit lately, so I decided to write a post about it.
To my knowledge, Peter Gordon at Fireball is the only editor who explicitly allows anonymous submissions. I don't know the inner workings of any crossword publication, so I don't know how much attention, if any, editors give bylines. I suspect nobody openly plays favorites, but I know from my days peer-reviewing academic papers that it's not easy to be totally objective evaluating work of people you know personally. Bylines for me were often unwelcome distractions.
So, I was thinking, if I was a crossword editor, I would give serious consideration to doing anonymous-only submissions. The upside is that it would be totally fair; the downside is that it wouldn't yield a roster of constructors with the type of diversity some solvers want. Well, I probably shouldn't just state these things as fact. Let's look into them a bit more deeply.
Would anonymous submissions be totally fair?
I mean, nothing is totally fair, but I think this would be as fair a process as reasonably possible. The obvious criticism of it is that editors, particularly straight, white, cis, male (SWCM) editors, would still be biased against non-SWCM constructors, because there would be different content in puzzles by such constructors, and editors would be less familiar with and thus less likely to accept this content (perhaps subconsciously). I've always been kinda uncomfortable with, and skeptical of, this argument -- uncomfortable, because it tacitly relies on stereotypes of what SWCM and non-SWCM people would or wouldn't know or find interesting/acceptable in crossword puzzles; skeptical, because a lot of the cited evidence of this type of bias I've found to be either outright inaccurate or misleadingly taken out of context.
But let's say for the sake of argument that the editor isn't SWCM, or let's say he is, but he's not the only editor. Let's say there's a team of several editors, and it's a really diverse team, like, United Colors of Benetton-ad diverse.* And then the team selects and edits puzzles as a group, or if they can't come to a consensus, they take turns.** Would anonymous submissions be totally fair in this case?
*So, apparently I'm envisioning editors of different colors, who happen to all be young, thin, conventionally attractive and topless.
**I don't know how realistic having a team of equal co-editors is in practice -- salaries, budgets, and whatnot -- but it could be approximated by having assistant editors and test solvers/consultants who think differently from the head editor. And maybe some publications already do this.
If you were a rejected constructor, it certainly would be hard to claim bias was the reason. The editing team couldn't be biased against you personally, because they wouldn't know it's you, and if nobody among a diverse group or editors chose your puzzle, then it's probably also not any sort of implicit bias. So, yes, I think this would be a very fair way to do things.
But fairness isn't the only consideration, which brings me to my next question.
Would anonymous submissions be equitable?
No, I don't think so -- by which I mean I don't think it would close the gap between the number of puzzles published by SWCM and non-SWCM constructors you see at most mainstream publications. It might even widen it. I have no reason to believe there is any difference in quality between puzzles made by SWCM constructors and non-SWCM constructors, and so what would happen, if submissions were anonymous, is that, over a large enough sample, the acceptance percentages would almost perfectly mirror the submission percentages. And according to everything I've heard, submissions to mainstream crossword publications are dominated by SWCM constructors. I think it has gotten a little bit less lopsided in recent years with the rise of social-media-based crossword collectives, diversity fellowships, and the solicitations of veteran constructors (not me, but better people than me) to tutor new constructors -- all commendable efforts, by the way -- but the numbers still seem pretty far away from those of society overall. The last time I saw the NYT stats published, for example, well over 50% of the submissions were from male constructors.
Tangential question: Why is there this gender imbalance?
It's something I've thought about a lot, not just in crossword puzzles, but in many activities I love (like math and Scrabble), and I've come to this profound conclusion: I don't know. My best guess is that there is something we are doing as a society that makes girls less likely to take interest in such things. It could be some form of sexism, but it doesn't seem to be anything direct -- most crossword (and math and Scrabble) communities I've encountered are very encouraging and welcoming to everybody -- so I don't think it's a problem with crossword publishing, per se, or something crossword editors can, or should be expected to, somehow solve on their own.
To get a better idea of what I mean, consider not crossword constructing, but competitive crossword solving. The male-female disparity among the top solvers is even bigger than it is among constructors. Of the top 100 finishers at this year's ACPT, only about 25% are women; among the top 10, this number falls to 10%; among the three big-board finalists, 0%. In the past 20 years, I believe there have been only two female finalists and no champions. (Ellen Ripstein won it in 2001.)
The question again: Why is this the case?
The answer again: I don't know.
But whatever it is, I don't think it's the tournament's fault. I don't see anything in the rules that would inherently favor men; the puzzles are constructed by both men and women; the tournament is administered and refereed by both men and women (and they do a damn fine job, whoever they are!); and there isn't, to my knowledge, some sort of cabal among the top solvers to keep women our their ranks. So... I don't know. I've asked a few women their opinions on the subject, and their response is usually the same as mine... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Getting back to construction, it's time for the final bold-face question.
What submission procedures would be both fair and equitable?
Ay, there's the rub! I don't see a way to do this right now. If an editor wants, say, half of all puzzles to be published by women, it seems to me the only way they can do that is by fiat -- decree it as so, and then in some way give preference to submissions by women until they get the percentages they desire.
And if an editor wants to do that, then that's their prerogative -- more power to them -- but it's definitely not my preferred system. It's not because such a system would work against me as an SWCM constructor (well, maybe that's, like, 3% of it, but no more than that). It's because it doesn't feel appropriate to me to evaluate somebody's work based in any way on their identity characteristics. If editors do this, in effect what they must tell certain constructors is: Sorry, I would accept your puzzle, but I already have my limit by constructors who look like you. You probably don't know these other constructors. They probably aren't relevant to you or your work in any way, and you might be otherwise total different from them, but you kinda look like them, so, regrets.
That just doesn't feel right to me. It doesn't seem like progress.
The other thing about explicitly taking into consideration one's identity characteristics when evaluating their work is that you run the risk of stepping into the "who qualifies?" briar patch. In a previous post, I poked fun at the NYT Diverse Crossword Constructor Fellowship,* asking "how gay do you have to be to qualify?" It's a joke, obviously, but maybe not actually that ridiculous a question. For instance, if you mostly present as SWCM, but you like to have sex with men every now and then, do you qualify as a member of the LGBTQ community for the purposes of this fellowship? What if you just fantasize about having sex with men every now and then? Or what if you're biracial -- like, you look pretty white, but your mom is from India? And is anybody actually checking this, or is it all based on self-identification? Looks like we have an application from somebody named Dolezal... Rachel Dolezal.**
*I don't dislike this fellowship, by the way. In theory, I don't love the idea of categorizing people by identity in this way, but I'm also not a huge "in theory" guy. Ultimately, it's just new people getting into constructing, which is not something I'm ever going to hate on. Plus, I read the profiles of the first class, and everybody seems lovely.
**She would qualify anyway, because she's a woman, but it's still a pretty good joke.
In general, I would like it if in Crossworld we de-emphasize identity. To me, the ideal system is not one in which exactly x% of puzzles are constructed by women, y% by people of color, and z% by LGBTQ folks (with ε% added each time the initialism is extended by a letter). To me, the ideal system is one in which nobody would ever even think to calculate these percentages, in which doing so would be as silly as categorizing constructors by blood type or hair color or innie/outie bellybuttons. Is that too unrealistic? Well, you may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one.
Wait, I think I just quoted John Lennon unironically. It's time to wrap up this post.
Until next time...
