Monday mornings are often a mixed blessing for me - and not just because the weekend is over and my work week beginning. It's because I purposely wait until Monday morning to open the Good Weekend mailbox and see what kind of reaction we've received to Saturday's magazine.

The megaphone of social media has usually given me some idea, but it's those who bother to type out an email, put their name to it and press send who often have the most considered - and yes, confronting - things to say.

Editing a magazine with as broad a readership as Good Weekend, one with a raison d'etre to cover the water-cooler issues of the day and whose readers are vitally engaged in the national conversation, means that whilst we thankfully get bouquets every weekend, we also get plenty of brickbats. Put it this way: I tend to wear my steel underpants on a Monday.

I hasten to add, that's a good thing. I love my steelos. Readers keep me on my toes, and the result of their collective feedback is that I'm hyper-aware of the mix of people and issues featured in our magazine.

Do we have enough women? Young people? Stories on those from non-Anglo backgrounds? Enough politics, social justice, business, culture, sport? Are we covering fun as well as serious topics? Inducing not just despair but joy? Looking forward as well as backwards?

And here's the thing: the mix can skew pale, male and stale before I've even had the chance to say, "hello, Monday morning". Men - middle aged white men - still dominate the corridors of power, and those in the public eye, doing stuff of interest to the nation, get a good share of editorial space, for obvious reasons.

But men also put themselves forward for interview, and say yes to media requests, fairly freely, perhaps more freely than their female counterparts, although I have no empirical evidence to back that up.

And I'd hazard a guess that, across the board, women magazine writers pen more profiles on men than male magazine writers do on women. Does that mean the men are less interested in women's stories than the women are in stories involving men? I really don't know - I hope not.

I remember the difficulty of getting women photographed for The Australian Financial Review Magazine's annual Power Lists when I was there. Of the few women who would feature on the lists - which represented power as it was, not as it should be, and thus were inevitably male-skewed - many would say no to a fresh picture being taken for the list.

The result was that, despite our best intentions, the lists were often visually a sea of men in suits. I always thanked the gods for Julie Bishop, who like most of the men, always obliged, turned up on time and looking fabulous, and had a laugh along the way.

So I say to women: keep putting yourself forward. Say yes even at the risk of looking like you're blowing your own trumpet (you won't – and anyway, who cares if you do?). Say yes even if you think you're not expert enough, or good enough, or photogenic enough (you are). And I say to myself: beware the skew. Keep working hard to counter the skew. Make sure the stories you tell

about women are not just about injustice but also about success. Keep looking beyond the highway, down the alleyways, for stories of people outside the limelight, beyond the status quo.

Because it's our job in the media, and my job specifically at Good Weekend, to represent Australia as it is - male and female, young and old, rich and poor, from a range of culturally diverse backgrounds. In all our fabulous, imperfect glory.