Here's Dahlia

And I thought I was the only one paying attention. Dahlia Lithwick jumps into the fray over the absence of female columnists in Slate - I'm not hurt she didn't link to Fab Girl. But it's all OK, she says, women are self selecting out of the fray (all italics are mine):

Many bloggers point to the gender disparity among the nation's top political bloggers to illustrate the point that even where there are no barriers to entry—no consciously or unconsciously prejudiced gatekeepers barring the doors—women may simply choose to stay away from certain types of media. And just as women may not be producing opinion journalism at the same rates as men, they may not be consuming it all that much either. In short, there may be an interesting market problem at work here: I know an awful lot of smart, accomplished women who avoid both the op-ed pages and the Crossfire-style "screaming shows" because that is simply not the type of discourse they seek out or value.
I can also swear to the fact that as an editor, the number of pitches I receive from men outnumbers the pitches I see from women by several orders of magnitude. I can add, again purely anecdotally, that women largely send in pitches for reported pieces, and are far less inclined to frame a piece as an "argument"—which may prove Tannen's point that argument is not necessarily a comfortable or natural mode of communication for women (a phenomenon I observed in law school as well). This is, in short, an insanely interesting thought problem to which we are applying very little interesting thought.

Only a woman could suggest that women don't like to argue and not get called on it. This is starting to sound a little Lawrence Summers/"Math is hard" Barbie to me.