I had thought that closing the interview gender gap would be a simple combination of awareness and effort, but I quickly learned that there were complicating factors. Publishers tend to do a better job of promoting male authors, and it was much harder to secure interviews with household-name female thinkers. Women already face disadvantages in academia and journalism, so there were murkier issues of self-selection involved as well.

I'd estimate the Up Close team has put in more than twice as much time and effort into booking guests as we would have if we ignored gender ratios. But it's been worth it for all the compelling interviews and books we would have otherwise missed out on. There have been other rewards, too: Poring through book publishers' catalogues to find titles authored by women led me to Tracy McNulty’s Wrestling with the Angel: Experiments in Symbolic Life, a book that's by far had the greatest impact on my thinking this year.

The first excuse I often hear for why gender parity can't be achieved in forums like our television show is that the pool we're drawing from isn't diverse enough. Indeed, the vast majority of books that get published in a given year are authored by men. This is a ratio skewed even further by the kinds of genres and subject matter I wanted to include in the show. A show like Up Close is biased against novelists, because of the complications of revealing some (but not too much) of their story to an audience that largely hasn't read their books; cookbooks don't do well outside of a kitchen set; and I like to limit self-help and memoir.

But when we started producing Up Close, I didn't think about any of that. The very first efforts to sign up guests had me simply making lists of the books and authors that seemed most interesting for me and our viewers and listeners, while trying to be "gender-blind."

Generally, I draw up lists that are five or 10 times as large as we actually have slots on the program, because many authors—especially on the journalistic/academic end of things—simply won't be available to come to our Manhattan studio at all, or won't be able to do so on a date and time that works for us. Very quickly, this "gender-blind" approach proved a failure for our purposes: Our first 10 guests for our first 5 shows were all men. And frankly, they were all good guests to have. But it made me realize we shouldn't simply be asking, "Is this person interesting enough to bring on our air?" Rather, a longer question was required: "Is this person interesting enough to bring on our air, knowing that if the person is a man, he'll be taking a woman's place?"

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Creating a list of potential guests that was 50 percent women was an obvious starting point in creating a gender-mindful balance. Because so many more published books are written by men, finding enough women authors to create that balance required more than twice as much effort. One imprint that publishes a lot of the kind of work we like to feature on Up Close, Basic Books, had 20 men to 4 women in its catalog (and two of those women ended up on the show).