IN A POST to the Humanist discussion group on May 16, 2016, Canadian scholar François Lachance cited a remark by Gilbert Murray, long-time Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Oxford: “An apparatus criticus is a list of the MS. variations, with occasional remarks thereon. Only men of the highest moral character, religion, and social grace can produce one satisfactorily.” Now, eighty years on, it is difficult to imagine the intellectual environment in which such a statement could pass even as some kind of joke. Many scholarly editions are produced by scholars of many genders, who would blush to claim any form of character, religion, or grace. But how far have we come from those days? The beginnings of this article lie in the discussion which arose on Twitter and elsewhere in May 2015 following the publication of an article by Gordon Hunt in the online journal Silicon Republic titled “There Is Certainly No Gender Imbalance in Digital Humanities!” Hunt's article, itself, is not worth much attention: it is really no more than a report of an interview with Sandra Collins, the director of the Digital Repository of Ireland. Collins asserts, on no evidence, that there is an even 50/ 50 split of men and women in digital humanities in Ireland and the UK. Hunt repeats this claim, and turns it rather carelessly into a global statement.

As can happen, the discussion inspired by the article was more valuable than the article itself. On May 23, Lorna Hughes, then professor of digital humanities at the School of Advanced Studies, University of London, tweeted a link to the Hunt article. This sparked a mini-storm of comment about the article, with some agreeing with the assertion, some not, in a small torrent of opinion and anecdote. Then, something interesting happened. Scott Weingart, a digital humanities specialist at Carnegie Mellon University, saw the discussion. Within moments, he posted the tweet shown in Figure 1 (captured by Barbara Bordalejo, whose account I am here following).

Weingart's simple chart showed decisively that there is indeed a gender imbalance in the authors accepted each year at the showpiece event of digital humanities: the annual conference of the Association of Digital Humanities Organizations.