"In this light, that all-male police panel began to look more sinister. In Austria, women are excluded from public life. What worries me is that no one notices it. And then it becomes apparent in the New World, too. The Austrian panel was a "wall of men," the phrase I use to describe Canadian journalism and politics among other things. The June issue of The Walrus is almost entirely written by men, from letters to the editor to columns to features to cartoons to fiction to book and art reviews to the crossword.

The May 5 issue of The New Yorker is equally all-male. The Wall Street Journal has just n...

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"In this light, that all-male police panel began to look more sinister. In Austria, women are excluded from public life. What worries me is that no one notices it. And then it becomes apparent in the New World, too. The Austrian panel was a "wall of men," the phrase I use to describe Canadian journalism and politics among other things. The June issue of The Walrus is almost entirely written by men, from letters to the editor to columns to features to cartoons to fiction to book and art reviews to the crossword.

The May 5 issue of The New Yorker is equally all-male. The Wall Street Journal has just named the top 20 influential business thinkers, not a woman among them. And of course Hillary Clinton is vilified by the media. I think she deserves to be, but not because she is a woman.

These are all spores of the same fungus, the continuing unwillingness of many men (and many women) to allow women equal power. Elisabeth Fritzl's unspeakable life is merely a grotesque extension of a common tendency. It still reigns in Austria, less so here, but it's only a question of degree."