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Y'know, I'm not normally the kind of person who goes around counting the number of people in a given category who are represented in a particular situation. I've been known to do it now and then, but more along the lines of "Isn't it interesting that the majority of tech writers I've worked with are white and female?" than suggesting that Something Is Wrong.

But something occurred to me this past April, perhaps under the influence of an impending WisCon: there are a much greater number of male authors represented in Gardner's Year's Best SF than female authors.

And so I got curious and started looking at other Year's Bests that I happen to have on hand. Here's what I've seen so far. (I'm leading off with a couple of old Terry Carr anthologies just 'cause I happen to have them on hand, and the historical data might be interesting.) I could've counted number of stories written by each gender, but instead chose to count number of authors of each gender represented; if an author has two pieces in a given book, I only count the author once, and two authors for a given piece are each counted separately. Year given is anthology publication year; stories in each anthology were published the previous year. I really oughtta put this in a database, but this is more convenient at the moment.

I find these numbers interesting. One might, I suppose, going by traditional gender stereotypes/roles, expect that more men than women are writing science fiction per se (as opposed to fantasy), and one might expect to find that reflected in the SF-only volumes. And one might (by the same reasoning) expect the gender ratio to be more balanced in fantasy, which would explain the Datlow/Windling numbers. But then the Hartwell/Cramer numbers surprise me.

Ellen and Terri consider sources well outside the traditional realm of speculative-fiction publications—for example, their 2001 anthology contains a Louise Erdrich story originally published in the New Yorker, and the aforementioned Harlan Ellison story published in the United in-flight magazine. Can this account for the difference? Does that suggest that in the standard genre publications, vastly more male authors than female authors are getting published? I didn't think that was true, but the Broad Universe stats page does seem to suggest it; doesn't talk about authors published in the magazines, but does talk about sf novels being published, where the gender ratio is roughly 1/3 female authors, 2/3 male authors. (That page also has a section that covers some of the same data as my table above, but not all of it, and counts number of stories rather than number of authors, and goes by story-publication year rather than anthology-publication year, so where I overlap with them, the numbers don't quite match up. Pretty close, though. I should probably hand my data over to them and let them continue to maintain it in a centralized location.)

Without going out of our way for gender balance, we in the SH fiction department have published 31 male authors and 23 female authors so far. (We've got a run of male authors coming up, though, so those numbers are going to shift a bit in the next few months.) But then, we don't publish the gadgets-and-science hard-SF stories that are a staple of Year's Best SF anthologies.

I don't have any data on what the authorial gender ratio is in the print magazines. A quick look at a recent issue of Asimov's shows 9 stories by male authors, 1 by a female author, but I don't know if that's representative, either of Asimov's or of the other magazines. (Hmm: perhaps next time Gardner makes a joke to the effect that authors have to sleep with editors to get published, someone should respond, "So that's why there are so many male authors in Asimov's!") (. . . I'm hoping that if this ever gets back to Gardner he'll find it funny rather than annoying.)

The Broad Universe stats page also indicates that Campbell winners in recent years have been pretty evenly split between male and female. I wonder if that plus the SH data suggests that there are a lot more up-and-coming female speculative fiction authors than established Big Names. That would kinda make sense; if the field has traditionally been heavily male, and the male longtime writers are still writing, and new male writers are also joining the field, then it makes sense that it would take a lot of new female writers to balance the numbers. Bodes well for more balance in the future, assuming the new female writers don't get driven off by the maleness of it all. I do find it a little disheartening, though, that the Year's Best SF anthologies haven't shown a noticeable shift in this direction at all in recent years.

Perhaps what it really comes down to is editorial taste: if more men than women are writing what the editors like, then more men than women will get published.

No answers as usual. But plenty to think about.