Like many women of a certain age, I have a bad habit, first learned in the 1960s and '70s. Whenever I'm in a professional setting, I count the number of women in the room. These days there are occasions when I don't have enough fingers and toes to do the job. Which brings me to the present, and an ugly little spat that is roiling the waters of opinion journalism in the same way that Lawrence Summers's comments about the dearth of women in math and science rocketed through the academy. Op-ed pages, the accepted wisdom insists, don't carry enough...