megmccarron: Deja vu all over again

Meghan (

megmccarron) wrote,
@ 2005-11-13 18:11:00

Deja vu all over again
A project:

Replace every mention of "reviewer" with "science fiction writer" and "book" with "story" and see if you're reminded of anything.

Focusing on the power handed to male reviewers, Caplan suggested that one remedy would be to increase the number of female reviewers, and offered to supply the names of qualified candidates. McGrath replied that he would welcome suggestions, but "our standards are so high that a great many writers—even published writers—don't meet them." As for the attention to male authors, he explained, "more books are written by men than by women."

Men write more books than women? Caplan and her co-author searched for evidence to support that claim, but found none.

From this tidbit on gender parity in the NYTBR.

This is not a genre problem. This is not even a FICTION problem. This is sexism, plain and simple, across the board in the world of letters. Hate to use such a retro, "feminist" word for it, but I'm at a loss for a more progressive one. We may not notice it happening, but the fact remains that college creative writing classes are, on average, 80/20 women/men; Clarion is 50/50; but literary markets, and the genre pro's, barely make it to a 2:1 men to women ratio. It may have happened subconsciously. That's fine. But to turn away and ignore it after it's been pointed out? That conscious, and guess what? That's pretty damn shitty. I would love to see a Trampoline-style 10-men 10-women mag come out once a month for a year and see what happens. Do more women get noticed? Do more women get more money so they have more time to write? Do more women get awards? Do subscriptions go up, because women who were sick and tired of not seeing themselves represented get excited about a magazine? Fantasy Magazine is off to a pretty okay start (8 men, 7 women, though on the cover it advertises 4 men and 1 woman. That may be a symptom of a broader problem of visibility. Not quite sure). And I recognize that in general women submit less -- though not as drastically less as they make it into print. Suffice to say, no one can claim that this is a science fiction only problem, that it is simply 'how the genre works' or 'the way things are.' This is an artificial, society-driven, irrational inequality that has nothing to do with whether you write stories with elves and spaceships or not. And we should start putting some rational thought towards fixing it. Not just because it's better for half the population. Because it's better for writing and it's better for the magazines.

Anyway. I need some dinner.

(Post a new comment)

yuki_onna
2005-11-14 02:45 am UTC (link)

Yet Fantasy Magazine and Jabberwocky are being chided for containing predominately female writers--Locus specifically called the pubs out on such a detail. I personally heard FM called "twee" at the con, and from the stories this is hardly the case. Both are constantly commented on as being most female, and during the submission process, the editor was continually told not to include so many women writers, or it would be a women's magazine and no one would buy it.

The horror.

(Reply to this) (Thread)

"No One" meaning = Not Men
(Anonymous)
2005-11-14 12:41 pm UTC (link)

He was seriously told no one would buy a "women's magazine?"

Well, uh, maybe *women* would! I sometimes think this may be SF/F's big problem right now in short fiction. They're trying to cater to a very small gee-whiz male audience that's not reading as much, instead of going after the huge female audience that's reading Manga and fantasy novels (and male readers who may want something other than what they want to peddle.

"No one" would buy a fantasy magazine with predominately female writers?

AHAHHAhahahaHA a hahaahaHAaha

That says it all, right there.

As an aside, I loved Nick's story in FM.

- Kameron Hurley

(Reply to this) (Parent)

	(Anonymous) 2005-11-15 06:57 pm UTC (link)
	Look through the pages of Locus. How many books by women do they review? Hardly any. And when they do review them it's just a skinny little paragraph by Caroline Cushman. (Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

	yuki_onna 2005-11-15 06:57 pm UTC (link)
	Well, they reviewed me. ;) (Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

(no subject) - (Anonymous), 2005-11-16 03:11 am UTC

(no subject) -

coalescent, 2005-11-16 07:26 pm UTC

(no subject) -

coalescent, 2005-11-16 07:50 pm UTC

aimeempayne
2005-11-16 04:10 pm UTC (link)

Yeah, women don't buy magazines. Right. Someone should tell that to Better Homes & Gardens, Good Housekeeping, Family Circle, Woman's Day, and Ladies' Home Journal who all had higher circulation numbers in 2003 than Sports Illustrated, Playboy and Maxim.

Given, that doesn't speak specifically to the speculative fiction market, but it does suggest an untapped audience that is willing to make a year-long commitment to a periodical.

(Reply to this) (Parent)

	sallytuppence 2005-11-14 03:48 am UTC (link)
	Matt C told me (us? did you hear this, too?) at dinner GVG's defense of publishing--what was it, five issues in a row?--of F&SF without a woman author: he doesn't choose them by gender, he just chooses the stories he likes. Is that a tautology, or what? And I no longer subscribe to F&SF, so there. (Reply to this)

rambleflower
2005-11-14 08:30 am UTC (link)

Sing it, sister. Every mag or antho I come across, the first thing I automatically do is scan for female names. And I usually am annoyed by what I find. I'm pretty sick of male writers telling me to chill because, oh look, there's one woman's name on the cover (out of five), too.

Nine Muses, the Wheatland Press antho that just came out w/ all female authors, is not being reviewed anywhere I can find (I was looking because, well, I'm in it and I'm an author with normal author urges :-) It was suggested to me that this is probably because there's only women in it. Bah! I say, Bah!

(Reply to this) (Thread)

	sallytuppence 2005-11-14 01:39 pm UTC (link)
	Sing it, sister. Every mag or antho I come across, the first thing I automatically do is scan for female names. Me, too. This is why me and Jenn have to do our Kick-Ass Females anthology! And I'm gonna commission a story from Marguerite Reed (go read the first half of her long story in SH this week!). (Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

	jennreese 2005-11-14 07:44 pm UTC (link)
	Yep. Yep to everything. Yep and double yep. (Reply to this) (Parent)

(Anonymous)
2005-11-14 12:59 pm UTC (link)

Do more women get noticed? Do more women get more money so they have more time to write? Do more women get awards? Do subscriptions go up, because women who were sick and tired of not seeing themselves represented get excited about a magazine?

From the "we're doomed, we're all doomed" stance traditionally adopted by genre observers, these are absolutely the crucial questions. Unfortunately, many editors keep trying to halt circulation atrophy by retreating to more and more conservative stances; trying to lure back their graying (or, often, dead) former audience instead of trying to attract/build a new audience. Most of us who follow the genre short fiction biz have heard the requests for "more spaceships," which is kind of the shorthand for that attitude.

Anyway, while it's ridiculous to have to be having this discussion (or having it again, I guess) it's still very important that it be had, so props to you, Meghan.

Oh, and don't forget Realms of Fantasy--the covers and the design are their problems, but the TOC tends, in my unscientific observation, to cast a much broader net than a lot of other genre magazines.

Cheers,

Christopher

(Reply to this)

	(Anonymous) 2005-11-14 03:27 pm UTC (link)
	For ASZAS (which, admittedly, was a pretty phallocentric subject), submissions from men outnumbered submissions from women about four to one. For Twenty Epics it was two to one. I don’t know when I’ll next get around to doing an anthology, but any suggestions for outreach would be greatly appreciated in the meantime. (Reply to this) (Thread)

	(Anonymous) 2005-11-14 03:28 pm UTC (link)
	Er, that was me. -- David M. (Reply to this) (Parent)

(Anonymous)
2005-11-14 08:48 pm UTC (link)

I don’t know when I’ll next get around to doing an anthology, but any suggestions for outreach would be greatly appreciated in the meantime.

David, lately for Say..., when we first announce a new theme I've only sent the info to the editors of the Broad Universe, Carl Brandon Society and Friends of Lulu (women in comics SIG) e-newsletters. The other market news places like the Rumor Mill and so on inevitably pick up on it, but I hold off on active open calls for submissions until later on in any given reading period. We don't try to skew our TOC away from straight white guys so much as we try to skew our slush pile away from from straight white guys.

That said, have we (and when I say "we" I'm not using the editorial we, I'm speaking of Gwenda and myself) ever made an editorial decision that meant choosing to include one story over another at least partly because we knew one of the authors to be a woman? Sure we have. I guess that leaves us wide open to charges of tokenism, but somehow we'll weather those, should they ever appear (we pay ten bucks for stories, I'm kind of doubting there'll be an outcry). Since I'm, oh, 99% positive that decisions to not publish pieces have been made for the opposite rationale by the editors of a whole lot of other genre mags, I find that I'm comfortable with it.

Details about our next issue can be found on the October 30th entry of my journal if anybody cares. We need stories, poems and comics.

http://christopherrowe.typepad.com/uncommonwealth/

--Christopher

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

(Anonymous)
2005-11-14 09:13 pm UTC (link)

And in fact, to add just a smidge to what Christopher says here, one of the main reasons we started Say... at all was because we were frustrated as hell with the monthlies' TOCs. We both wanted more places where a more diverse group of young (not necessarily in age, but in the sense of publications) women and men could publish. We have not always managed to completely flip the TOC, but the women have won in total word count every time. The amazing thing is that telling people you want them to send you stories works, as does publishing stories by women and non-white men*. I don't feel we've had to make any concessions on quality to get the TOCs we've had and I'm very proud of them. The place where I'm more likely to choose one story over another if it's close is if the writer hasn't published at all. (And it's likely to come down on the side of the unpublished writer.)

Anyway, I do think based on what I've heard several smart people who have done lots of writing award jury time say that there's a definite reading bias that shifts toward men even when none of the parties involved are evil. Many people have said that one of the reasons male writers win more awards is that jurors can consense around the best books by men, but tend to have wildly varying opinions when it comes to the work of women. No doubt this is partially because of canon and what they teach us in school. There are other things going on too, some of them quite mysterious. I find it fascinating and, of course, infuriating. I wish we could convince all the major SF mag editors to read stories blind from names for one month and see how what they picked would break down in terms of gender. It would be a fascinating experiment.

I should stop now before I keep going on about how not publishing very many women pretty much guarantees you won't see as many stories by women. Has anyone done a breakdown of this year's genre awards? It seemed to me that at the Nebs and Hugos this year women did much better than proportionate in terms of winning, if not nominations. Could it be that some small portion of the vast, largely uncatered to audience of SF-reading women actually vote for these awards? Y'think?

*We love you, white men of the genre, but c'mon, give up a little of the pie.

http://gwendabond.typepad.com

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

(no subject) - (Anonymous), 2005-11-14 09:31 pm UTC

(no subject) -

megmccarron, 2005-11-15 01:00 am UTC

Broad Universe efforts with the slush ratio -

ex_hhw543, 2005-11-16 05:35 am UTC

(no subject) -

coalescent, 2005-11-16 07:33 pm UTC

	joannemerriam 2005-11-15 01:59 am UTC (link)
	any suggestions for outreach would be greatly appreciated in the meantime This might be both more work, and more personal, than you want to get into, but invites to published writers whose work you've liked would probably garner some pretty great submissions. (Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

	(Anonymous) 2005-11-15 03:07 pm UTC (link)
	It probably would, but I’m uncomfortable with soliciting stories, for unrelated reasons. I’d much rather have a slush pile large enough and diverse enough that I can afford to turn down good stories, than have the twenty people of my choice each send me a tailor-made piece. -- David M. (Reply to this) (Parent)

joannemerriam
2005-11-14 06:33 pm UTC (link)

When I worked at the Writers' Federation of Nova Scotia, I noted that our membership was about 2/3 women. Of our professional membership, it was about half and half. If you removed the poets (predominantly female) and the children's writers (overwhelmingly female), the professional writers were about 2/3 male.

Now, that's a self-selected group, of not just writers, but writers-who-recognize-the-use-of-networking, or perhaps writers-who-have-$35-to-spare, but still. I thought it was interesting.

(Reply to this)

(Anonymous)
2005-11-14 11:26 pm UTC (link)

Here's an article that looked into some of the stats back in 2002:
http://www.sfwa.org/bulletin/articles/linville.htm

I was floored when Sean told me people had criticized him for including so many women in his magazine. (WTF?!) I just got the issue of Locus with the review of Jabberwocky in it (by Rich Horton) and it doesn't exactly criticize the magazine for having so much work by women in it, but it does note it: "Sean Wallace has put together a brief anthology of weird fantastical stories (mostly quite short) and poetry, Jabberwocky. The stories are all by women, and so are almost all of the poems." It is odd that in a review where Horton was so obviously pressed for space that he would include that sentence, but maybe he was just trying alert the "female audience" that there was now something available for Them.

Somebody upthread quoted me as saying that Gordon has said he doesn't look at gender when reading. I expect what I was trying to relate was what Gordon is reported as saying in the article I linked to above; as far as I know, he no longer comments on this subject.

I bought a copy of Nine Muses at World Fantasy and will, I hope, get a chance to read and review it before the end of the year. I haven't seen any reviews of it, but I also don't know when it came out.

(Reply to this) (Thread)

	(Anonymous) 2005-11-14 11:28 pm UTC (link)
	Dammit, I'm not anonymous, I'm me: Matt Cheney. (Further reminder that I need to break down and get an LJ account so I can comment unanonymously.) (Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

	(Anonymous) 2005-11-14 11:58 pm UTC (link)
	Resist! -- David M. (Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

(no subject) - (Anonymous), 2005-11-15 12:43 am UTC

(no subject) -

megmccarron, 2005-11-15 01:09 am UTC

(no subject) - (Anonymous), 2005-11-15 04:35 am UTC

(no subject) -

elysdir, 2005-11-15 05:20 am UTC

(no subject) -

elysdir, 2005-11-15 05:24 am UTC

(no subject) -

megmccarron, 2005-11-15 08:40 pm UTC

Chicks not Ready -

chance88088, 2005-11-16 12:35 am UTC

Re: Chicks not Ready -

joannemerriam, 2005-11-16 06:34 pm UTC

(no subject) - (Anonymous), 2005-11-15 09:51 pm UTC

(no subject) - (Anonymous), 2005-11-16 03:51 am UTC

(no subject) - (Anonymous), 2005-11-16 03:52 am UTC

(no subject) -

nihilistic_kid, 2005-11-21 05:04 am UTC

(no subject) - (Anonymous), 2005-11-28 10:48 pm UTC

Consider my principles compromised -

secretmegreader, 2005-11-15 10:15 pm UTC

Re: Consider my principles compromised -

megmccarron, 2005-11-15 10:24 pm UTC

	(Anonymous) 2005-11-15 12:01 am UTC (link)
	WTF?!: Yes, W? Who, I wonder, and what were they on? (Although, given some complaints I've seen Sean make about various things in various places, I tend to take everything he says with a grain of salt.) -- David M. (Reply to this) (Parent)

	chance88088 2005-11-16 12:39 am UTC (link)
	Oh and I totally forgot to ask how you resisted commenting on the most loathesome moment in the article when they get a pat on the head and are told "if you're reasonable [aka not a hysterical female] you'll see he's doing the best he can for you [since you can't do it yourself] so please stop your whining, kthanx?" (Reply to this) (Thread)

Modest Proposals
(Anonymous)
2005-11-29 08:45 pm UTC (link)

Okay, in addition to the above proposals, I call for:

1) Men to boycott awards juries

2) An open anthology that pays women double what it pays men

3) About the women not submitting thing... there must be something to be done about this. Some kind of buddy/escrow system... hmm, okay, how about this? A website where you register the name of your story, your email, and a list of markets that you promise you going to send the story to. There must be at least five venues in your queue.

The website knows the response times (from one of those market database sites) and it nags you. "You submitted 'Languorous Willy' to Asimov's three months ago, it is now time to query. if they have already responded click below..."

I see this as a partnership between, maybe, Broad Universe and one of the market sites (Engen? Bluejack?)

4) Okay, also: Grameen (http://www.gfusa.org) style group microcredit lending for circles of women (and other underrepresented) writers. Managed through Speculative Literature Foundation, Broad Universe, Carl Brandon, etc. The proposing organization lends/grants money to a circle of (e.g.) women writers to enable them to devote more time to writing. They have to qualify for inclusion somehow, e.g. some initial publication.

Here's the catch: they don't have to repay the loan if they submit a sufficient number of manuscripts over the next two years to qualifying markets. Otherwise they have to repay with interest. And here's the double-catch: like Grameen, it's a collective responsibility system, where a minimum number of the group members have to submit each a minimum number of mss to qualify. And maybe some other minimum number have to make sales, just to make sure people aren't just giving up and sending out blank paper? Anyway, the idea being that the circle of participants has to nag/support/cajole/break each other's legs.

Actually you probably wouldn't have to do a lot of selection if you have the so-many-sold requirement, since the participants would then self-select people for their team who they had confidence could sell.

The amount of money need not be large.

Thoughts? Flames? :-)

Ben (http://www.benjaminrosenbaum.com)

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

Re: Modest Proposals - (Anonymous), 2005-11-29 11:04 pm UTC

Re: Modest Proposals -

megmccarron, 2005-11-29 11:07 pm UTC

Re: Modest Proposals - (Anonymous), 2005-11-30 01:48 am UTC

Re: Modest Proposals - (Anonymous), 2005-12-01 05:10 am UTC

Huuuuuge untapped market
(Anonymous)
2005-12-01 02:23 pm UTC (link)

Recently, BBC news reported that more than half of the viewers of the UK Scifi channel are female. Everyone knows women read more than men. This smells like a huge opportunity for female SF writers. Personally, I've been hawking a chick lit/SF short for a few years now and was shut out of the SF market (Scifiction, F& SF, Writers of Tomorrow, etc.). I finally sold it to Salon.

Perhaps the answer is for women SF writers to bust out of the genre ghetto and start going after Jane Mundane and her hungry book club sisters. Any editors willing to bridge the gap between chicklit and SF out there?

--Lauren McLaughlin
http://laurenmclaughlin.net/
(sorry, I posted as anonymous because I didn't know how to list my name)

(Reply to this) (Thread)

Re: Huuuuuge untapped market

megmccarron
2005-12-01 05:31 pm UTC (link)

Lauren, it's so funny you should say that, b/c recently I've been thinking about writing this chick lit meets fantasy kind of piece. I think you're totally right, women love SF (my MOM was the one to turn me on to all of it, from start trek to le guin, and yet she never goes into the SF section of a bookstore!) There seems to be a small groundswell of chick-lit-tone fantasy (Carpe Demon and Undead and Unappreciated, but on the SF side there's still not much. And then we've got this book called The Givenchy Code that's about a math geek fashionista codebreaker, which is getting us closer to SF -- oh, we're circling, we're circling!

Anyway. I can't wait to see this Salon piece!

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

Re: Huuuuuge untapped market - (Anonymous), 2005-12-01 08:42 pm UTC

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