At the New York Sun we had a rule banning the word "still" from headlines or the first paragraphs of news articles. I mean, an article about a police raid on a liquor still probably could have gotten past, but the point of the rule was that the newspaper was supposed to be about new things, not things that were still continuing.
That rule could have been usefully applied by the editors of the New York Times in killing an article that instead, alas, appears in today's paper under the headline "In Obama's High-Level Appointments, the Scales Still Tip Toward Men."
The article is the latest of three covering the issue of gender in President Obama's appointments. The first appeared in January on the Times front page under the headline, "Obama's Remade Inner Circle Has an All-Male Look, So Far." The second also appeared on the Times front page, under the headline, "In Tug of War Over New Fed Leader, Some Gender Undertones." All three Times articles carried the byline of Annie Lowrey and bear the faint but nonetheless distinctive odor of a campaigning agenda.
It would be one thing if Ms. Lowrey could unearth an example of Mr. Obama making sexist remarks about a job applicant, or hiring an unqualified male for a job over a more qualified woman. But the articles don't have any evidence of sexism by Mr. Obama, who appointed two women to the Supreme Court and has named women as secretary of state, national security adviser, commerce secretary, labor secretary, interior secretary, and ambassador to the United Nations. Instead they apply a kind of bean-counting analysis, by which the Obama administration's supposed failure to include women at its highest ranks in exactly the same proportion at which they appear in the general population amounts to some kind of egregious or newsworthy discrimination.
It's strange, too, because while the Times is watching the gender breakdown of President Obama's appointments like a hawk, it has, so far as I can tell, done no similarly aggressive analysis of the appointments to the administration through the lens of race, religion, Vietnam Veteran status, disability, class, sexual orientation, educational attainment, geographic or national origin, or other similar categories beloved by the diversity police. Somehow gender comes in for stricter scrutiny at the Times than the other categories, though for all we know the Obama administration's hiring tendencies in some of the other categories have been even more lopsided.