The writer and editor Anne Hays recently penned an open letter to the New Yorker on Facebook, demanding her money back for the most recent issue. Why? The New Yorker contained only two pieces by women – and it wasn't the first time. The letter went viral and was republished by publications such as Ms. and the website Jezebel – which used it to note how few other submission-based magazines have a regular number of women writers. Naturally it had its detractors as well, including Donald Douglas, who declared it an example of "feminist schizophrenia".

The letter sparked a broader discussion about how to raise the number of women represented on some of America's most prestigious mastheads. A consensus of sorts emerged: that editors play a huge role in which pitches get accepted and to whom assignments go. Ann Friedman, a former editor at AlterNet and the American Prospect, wrote that getting more women published would require editors to take concrete steps to solicit pieces from women writers and to be constantly vigilant in their efforts to bring parity, lest the slots inevitably go to the squeakist freelancer wheel (the person that pitches the most, and the most hard) or to only a few recognisable names. The Nation's Katha Pollitt wrote that women atop the masthead can ameliorate the problem but wouldn't be enough to bring parity of access, even as their presence in the pool of potentials start to overwhelm that of men.

And, of course, there's the new and ongoing call for quotas: in the UK, 73% of women felt the presence of a glass ceiling, whereas only 38% of men did. But even among young women – those under 30 – 24% of them figured on being their own bosses one day versus 20% of their male peers. So it's clearly no lack of ambition among my female peers. But there remain "quotas" – official and otherwise – among both liberal and conservative publications, to prevent having an all-male magazine even as women of all political stripes are demanding (and rightly so) a voice and a byline in publications that reflect their views.

As an editor, I sympathise with The Awl editor Choire Sicha, who went from working for others to being his own boss and suffered the slings and arrows of having a liberal site that doesn't quite achieve gender parity. In the media, as in my earlier career as a lobbyist, one comes to sadly realise that most applications come from men – even supremely unqualified ones. It's difficult to constantly try to beg certain writers to provide you with their work when others are imploring you for an opportunity, but it's no different in any industry: you promote the person asking for the promotion that they seemingly deserve more often than the utility player who fails to sell his or her work – and women are inevitably schooled in modesty while their male peers are schooled in self-promotion.

The cycle of pitching also doesn't play to the supposedly stereotypical female strengths: you have to brush off near-constant rejection, spend your days courting indifferent suitors and run around telling editors how amazing you are. And, as Pollitt and Friedman aptly pointed out, many of the people to whom you would be pitching pieces are men – and they have a point of view of what constitutes "serious" stories (ie "manly" topics) and what the "average" reader is interested in. Naturally, it's quite easy to conceive of the average reader as a man.

As liberal and progressive publications have struggled to find strong political female voices, conservatives have been experiencing a renaissance of women not seen since Phyllis Schlafly almost single-handedly defeated the equal rights amendment (and then thanked her husband for letting her out of the house). From Michelle Malkin to Ann Coulter, CNN contributor Dana Loesch and conservative atheist SE Cupp and beyond, the conservative movement and its media outlets seemingly have no difficulty in finding and promoting female voices – even the ones that support women maintaining traditional roles. And yet, the left seem to struggle with finding comparable thought-leaders and achieving parity.

Quotas on their own aren't going to help. They are, at their core, an acceptance that hiring practices are prejudiced in a way no one is interested in really thinking about or changing. Friedman was right about the need to seek out, cultivate and assign talent: as an editor or a manager, it's quite easy to take the applications or pitches that arrive, to allow the obsequious person to win the day and to rely on the reliable stand-in or the already-known talent. But it isn't the job of a good editor or a good manager to just pick the easiest option. The job of a good manager, or a good editor, is to find the best piece to inform the audience; to pick the employee who will catch what you miss; to pull in the talent that adds something to the organisation that it doesn't already possess.

If you can't get there without quotas then that's an organisational failure that will, eventually, catch up with you.