I can’t tell you how many times I’ve filled baseball trivia into a puzzle. Whether or not you’re a warrior for feminism, what this means is that the puzzle you solve is almost certainly a lot less interesting than it could have been. Try solving this puzzle by Zawistowski, celebrating the 50th anniversary of undergraduate coeducation at Princeton. (Since collaborations between a woman and a man count as “made by a woman” in this tally, that statistic, if anything, overstates how many women are making puzzles.) In all but one major market, the crossword editor - the person making decisions about which puzzles run and why - also is a man. The irony of this is not lost on me: As Adrienne Raphel ’10 notes in her recent book on crosswords, Thinking Inside the Box, The New York Times’ first crossword editor, who established so many of the puzzlemaking conventions we constructors still use today, was a woman: Margaret Petherbridge Farrar. The New York Times puzzle, considered the puzzle of record by many, keeps statistics on women constructors: Since 1993, when current editor Will Shortz took the helm, only 20 percent of Times puzzles have been created by women. But there was something that escaped my attention for a long time.Ĭhances are, the crossword you solved this morning was made by a man. I knew the bylines of my favorite puzzle makers (or “constructors,” in our parlance), especially since I started making puzzles myself in the early aughts. If I give a conservative estimate of having solved 20 puzzles a week over that time, it totals more than 20,000 puzzles since I first started doing them junior year in the Campus Club common room. I’ve been a competitive solver for close to 20 years, placing fourth in the 2019 tournament and among the top 10 six other times. But do you ever pay attention to who made your crossword puzzle? Most people don’t. I know I’m not alone among PAW readers in being a regular solver of crosswords, although I suspect I solve more of them than almost all readers of this magazine - except Dan Feyer ’99, who has won the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament a record-breaking eight times, including last year.
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