Beyond the quarrel, a woman's place is on this page.

How an e-mail exchange between two former classmates became a war of words, rumor and innuendo is not clear. But here's what is clear: Were it not for the controversy that erupted between Michael Kinsley, opinion editor of the Los Angeles Times, and me, the cause of gender diversity on opinion pages would never have gotten so much attention. Hopefully, that attention will bring much-needed change.

Depending on the day or the paper, three or four of the columns you read on the typical opinion page are likely to be written by a man, and if you're lucky, one by a woman. If you add the cartoon, which is almost always by a man, you can get to five or six opinions by men and one by a woman.

Now certainly women aren't a monolith, but to exclude half of the population from a page intended to represent diverse voices in the community seems plainly wrong. This is not a liberal-conservative issue: Ann Coulter told me not long ago that she couldn't get into an American paper large enough to be included in Lexis-Nexis.

This is a longstanding problem, which my students at USC Law School and I have been studying for some years. In February, there were no women at all on the op-ed page of The New York Times on 12 of 28 days, or nearly half the month. For the first nine weeks of 2005, according to The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz, 90 percent of the articles on the op-ed page of that paper were by men.

Two years ago, I was one of the leaders of an effort to protect the one female news columnist at the Los Angeles Times, when there was a proposal to downgrade her column. Only one of six New York Times columnists is a woman --even so, that paper still printed a slightly higher percentage of women (16 percent) than the Los Angeles Times (14.3 percent), which is hardly much to crow about. Since Feb. 14, when we began public scrutiny at the Los Angeles Times, the percentage of women on their op-ed page has increased 10 percent.

The question is whether those who are in a position to do something about it will recognize the need to do more than simply keep an eye out for a few good women, as everyone promises, and has been promising for years, to absolutely no avail.

People rarely sit down these days and say: Let's not call any women. Mostly, they call everyone they know--who happen to be the people they went to school with, played sports with, worked with in the past. Friends call old friends. Men call men. Editors call other editors, or other columnists, people who are already members of their club.

At my first Harvard Law School faculty meeting more than 20 years ago, I listened as my very senior colleagues described the ideal young recruit. Each described himself.

Unconscious discrimination produces pages that are 80 percent and 90 percent and sometimes even 100 percent male from people who feel annoyed at those who force them to confront the fact that what feels like neutral decision-making isn't.

In this case, the controversy became Estrich vs. Kinsley. It was not what I intended. I started out trying to get a letter to the editor published and ended up in a public battle. There was even the suggestion that I would lead a campaign against a newspaper to get my own column run by that newspaper, a suggestion that would be comical if it weren't so revealing.

I have a greater goal. My reward will come when I pick up the paper someday and see memorable columns by smart women who say they've never been the victims of discrimination.

One of them may be my daughter. Or yours.

Susan Estrich is a USC law professor and syndicated columnist.