Chicks and the SF rags Roundup

This was not so much a debate as a brain storming session, so I'm going to round it up a little differently. For those of you just tuning in, I started (triggered?) a discussion about persistent unbalanced ratios of men and women publishing within the SF world, jumping off of an article describing the problem in the lit world as well. I was struck that the problem was so consistent across the board in the writing world, and that consistency suggested to me that there was something artificial and societal (as opposed to a mere measure of talent, or a fluke within our genre) going on. The ensuing discussion was really fascinating, and stupid LJ hid lots of stuff away in threads, so I'm going to pull the meat of it up here (it would feel like an act of blogger hubris to spring for typepad, but damn if LJ doesn't suck for these debate-y things). I'm going to break the round-up into three sections, which to me represent how the discussion progressed -- Reactions, Stats, and Ideas.

Reactions
"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." --Heather Shaw

"I sometimes think this [dude overabundance in the TOCs] 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." --Kameron Hurley

"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." -- Christopher Rowe

"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." --Sarah Prineas

"Yet [despite the dude overabundance] Fantasy Magazine and Jabberwocky are being chided for containing predominately female writers--Locus specifically called the pubs out on such a detail." -- Catherynne Valente

"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." --Matt Cheney

Stats

[Locus reviews of books]By men: Anansi Boys, 9Tail Fox, Counting Heads, Learning the World (x2), Two-Handed Engine, The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl, The Stonehenge Gate, Pushing Ice, Orphans of Chaos, The Cuckoo's Boys, Stark and the Star Kings, A Feast For Crows, 20th Century Ghosts, Soundings, A Reverie for Mister Ray. Total: 16 books, 17 reviews.

By women: Two-Handed Engine, Harrowing the Dragon, Shaman's Crossing, Band of Gypsies, Ordinary People, The Children of the Company, Singing Innocence and Experience, Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, Stark and the Star Kings. Total: 9 books, 9 reviews.

Notes: Two-Handed Engine is a collected stories of Henry Kuttner and CL Moore, so gets counted in both; similarly Stark and the Star Kings is by Edmond Hamilton and Leigh Brackett. I've also excluded the art books from this count.

Carolyn Cushman adds five books by women and four by men, making the totals 20 (21) and 14, respectively.

The latest issue of Vector has a similar ratio; 44 books by men, 24 by women.

Not counting anthologies (edited by men, but include men and women writers, although again, not in an equal ratio), but counting next week's reviews, Strange Horizons is currently running at 4 books by men for every 3 by women. We'll probably skew slightly more male by the end of the year, unfortunately.

The latest NYRSF I have is September: 9 reviews, 7 of men, 2 of women.

The latest Foundation I have is Autumn: 8 reviews, 5 of men, 3 of women.

And I myself have written about 15 books by men and 11 by women. My aiming-to-review-before-the-end-of-the-year pile is three more by each. --Niall Harrison


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. --David Moles


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*.

*We love you, white men of the genre, but c'mon, give up a little of the pie. -- Gwenda Bond (about Say...)


Susan and I were both a little weirded-out when the breakdown of what we were planning to accept turned out to exactly match the breakdown of what was submitted -- which I didn't calculate till after we had the TOC. --David Moles


Don't know about the Nebulas, but women won pretty much exactly half the Hugos this year. --Niall Harrison


So my clarion class was pretty skewed in the male:female (12:4) ratio, but I've noticed a couple of years out that as far as persistence in submitting goes that all the women in my class (except me) have fallen by the wayside. The stickiness for men has been quite a bit better (something like half of the men are still submitting I think, as opposed to just me) and the sales ratios reflect that - I'm the only female from my class with any sales while 4 of the guys have made sales to pros or respected semipros. (Though as far as major sales go chicks and guys are at a 1 to 1 standoff.) --Chance Morrison


It's interesting to note that the data in Sue's article shows that (as she put it) "In general, male editors do not publish significantly fewer stories by women than their female counterparts." IIrc, the first year of Sci Fiction was almost entirely by male authors, and I don't think the gender balance in Asimov's has shifted significantly since Sheila took over. Realms, though, has a significantly higher ratio of female authors than the other print prozines. Is it because the editor is female? Because the magazine focuses on fantasy? I don't know. ...Also note that the Year's Best Fantasy & Horror volumes have a higher ratio of female authors than the other Year's Bests do (even the other ones co-edited by women, and even the other fantasy ones). Is that because they include poetry? Because they draw from sources outside the genre? I don't know. --Jed Hartman


Most editors on the gender-balance panels take the view that what they publish has about the same gender balance as what comes in. (Which imo lends weight to the Say approach.) This has led to my assiduously tracking author gender for SH submissions; we tend to get roughly 33%-40% stories by women, roughly 60%-67% by men. So one and a half to two times as many stories by men come in, but our publishing ratio lately has skewed in the other direction. In 2005, 60% of our stories are by women; in 2006 so far, it's 75%, though we've bought only a third of next year's stories so that'll likely change over the next six or eight months. We don't know why that is; we don't consider author gender when making our choices, but apparently we're more likely to like stories by women than a lot of the other pro editors are. Or something. It could be argued that we're the ones showing unfair bias, by buying a much higher percentage of submissions by women than of submissions by men. --Jed Hartman (about Strange Horizons)


Jed, I don't suppose you separately track stats for "What the hell were they thinking?" submissions? 'Cause I bet they'd skew heavily male. (Partly because I think men are more likely to use the shotgun approach to submissions, and partly because I think men are more likely to write kinds of stuff that would be blatantly wrong for SH. But I could be wrong.) --David Moles


That was certainly manifest in the Spicy Slipstream Stories slush; 100% of the WTF submissions were from male writers. --Nick Mamatas


I'm definitely a reluctant-to-send-stuff-out girl. I don't need to move beyond fingers to count how many submissions I've made in my life. And every rejection has stopped me sending anything else out for the next x amount of years. I know that kind of thing crosses gender lines---I've met blokes like me---but it definitely skews female.

I can't think of many tickets-on-themselves women, but I can think of a tonne of blokes. You know? Those guys who send out hundreds of stories at a time, even though they might not all be as good as they could be, who don't blink when rejected, but just keep on keeping on, because they just know that they're really really good and one day some editor will see it their way. I've met so many blokes like that, but nary a woman. It'd be great to get some more women thinking that way, well, not exactly that way, but, you know what I mean. --Justine Larbalestier


Ideas

...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. --Christopher Rowe


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. --Gwenda Bond


In an attempt to encourage more women to send out more stories, Broad Universe has had mailing parties several times over the past few years: a specified time frame during which members encourage each other to send out mss and report to the BU list what's been sent out. Other folks usually send messages with praise and further encouragement, so there's lots of positive reinforcement. We haven't kept track of how many mss have been sent out during mailing parties, but every now and then someone will mention a sale of something sent out then. --ex_hhw543


I'd love it if every incarnation of this discussion started by linking to (a) Sue Linville's gender-balance article (which someone upthread already linked to) and (b) the Broad Universe stats page (which is currently about three years out of date, but I've been tracking the Year's Best numbers in the subsequent years, and they haven't changed much). It's important to keep talking about this stuff -- but I think it's also important to be aware that it's not a new issue, and to point to related work others have done in the past. --Jed Hartman


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. --Ben Rosenbaum


The problem I see with (1) is that it would give the sort of men who wouldn’t do it a better chance of getting on awards juries. (2) sounds nifty. (3) .... there must be some nifty, Web 2.0, distributed, low-impact way to do (3). And maybe (4), too. (“You have to give the writing grants to the women — if you give it to the men they’ll just spend it on cigarettes and booze...”) --David Moles

If I ever get a writing grant, I fully intend to spend it on hookers. --Me

Like William Vollman? --Ben


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


I'd be happy to rewrite either of my novels in swirly cursive, and stick a skinny cartoon figure of a woman in Manolos on the cover if I thought it would help sell them. After all it's the dispersal of ideas that counts. --Lauren again


In Short
My own final thoughts, since it's my blog (ha!): I think the key to this issue, at the moment, is for women to get their submission numbers up (have you yelled at a female writer for not having more stories out today?), and for editors to think about where their slush comes from, how they treat it, and how they ultimately make their decisions. Personally, I find the "i take the best" discussion bullshit. Of course you take really really good stuff. But in my scant editing experience, I find it's not just your own greatest hits -- it's like making a dance mix. You get the crowd pleasers on there, some new joints, some old school, even a few risky jams that could either clear the floor or get the whole room on their feet. To mix metaphors futher, in the movie biz, the ideal audience breakdown is 50/50 male/female. Not that the movies are some bastion of female artistic empowerment. But if SF isn't even thinking that about its AUDIENCE, well, no wonder we're having sales problems. As for the bigger, more complicated solutions, such as those suggested by Ben -- my gut is to say those make more sense for novels than short fiction. But I have no head for that stuff, and it merits discussing.

I've got one more post about why exactly this merits talking about at all, but for the moment, I'm going to bed.