Not Surprised

I was reading an interesting article in the Huffington Post and, when I finished it, my first thought was, Hmm, I’m not surprised.

The article was about whether there is gender discrimination among book publishers. Here are a couple of snippets from the article:

The results clearly showed that venerable publications such as The Paris Review, Harper's Magazine, The New York Times Book Review and The Atlantic cover significantly more works by male authors.

One of the greatest offenders, The New Republic, reviewed over four times as many books by men than those by women. Similar results were reported for The London Review of Books.

The article looks at all 2011 books published by four of the major imprints: Knopf; Crown; Little, Brown; and Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. You can follow the link to see the pie charts included in the article, but here are the overall results from 2011:
Knopf: 96 Male – 58 Female
Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 106 Male – 23 Female
Crown: 37 Male – 37 Female
Little, Brown: 52 Male, 17 Female

Then they looked at publications coverage of books, in articles and reviews. There’s quite a few of those. Here’s a few:
Atlantic: 235 Male, 91 Female
Granta: 30 Male, 34 Female
Harpers: 141 Male, 42 Female
New Republic: 344 Male, 78 Female
Poetry: 179 Male, 134 Female

As you can see, women got more notice in Granta and ran close in Poetry, but except for Granta, the men dominated.

What do you think of these results? Does it show gender bias in general? Or are these results skewed because these publications focus on books written by men? Or is this to be expected since overall these four publishers publish more male authors than they do female? There are a lot of other publishers not analyzed in this article. If they had been, would it have made a significant difference in the statistics? What do you think about these results?