More gender stats

5 Comments

It's the end of June, so it's time once again for some stats on submissions by author gender.

Approximately 1250 stories have been submitted to Strange Horizons in the first six months of 2003. Of those:

  • 59% were written by men;
  • 34% were written by women;
  • 7% were written by authors of unknown (to me) gender.

These percentages almost exactly match the percentages for the first three months of the year; in fact, little has changed in any of the numbers since my first posting on gender stats in our submissions.

As a side note, of the stories currently on our 2003 schedule (covering roughly ten months), exactly half are by men and half by women. We don't give preferential treatment by gender; it's just happened to work out to be half-and-half so far, which pleases me immensely. (The percentage in past years of stories by women (among stories we've published) has been a little lower; recently, it was briefly a bit higher for the 2003 schedule, but the last couple of stories we've accepted happened to be by men.)

At the WisCon panel on this subject, one of the panelists (editor of TOTU, maybe? I'm blanking) said that he has an explicit policy of gender balance in his TOCs. It could be seen as a sort of affirmative action: if you've got more publishable-quality stories than you can take (we certainly do), then it seems reasonable to me in the abstract to make author gender one factor to consider when choosing which of those stories you're going to take. At the same time, I admit that I'd be a little uncomfortable implementing such a policy myself; it would be too easy for someone to (incorrectly) conclude that a story was chosen primarily because of the author's gender. But we've been (imo) lucky enough in our tastes to make this not an issue for us; we pick the stories that we like the best and are the most interested in publishing, and (to my pleased surprise) the gender balance seems to take care of itself.

5 Responses to “More gender stats”

  1. Celia

    I’m assuming point 3 is co-written stories? (as opposed to cow-written stories, like I tried to write first.) I should look at the numbers at the Fortean Bureau. I feel we’re getting and publishing more stories from men than women, but it’s always interesting to see how reality compares to belief.

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  2. Jed

    Nope, sorry, I should’ve been clearer: “unknown gender” means I don’t know the author’s gender. This is usually because their first name is gender-ambiguous (such as “Pat” or “Chris”) and I don’t have other evidence one way or t’other (such as a bio on their web page that’s in third person and uses a gendered pronoun).

    We do get a few stories by multiple authors, but those are so rare that I didn’t bother trying to take them into account. The Broad Universe system (which I use when I’m counting in published ToCs, for ease of comparing numbers) is to count a story that’s by one man and one woman as half a point in each category.

    Sadly, we get almost no cow-written stories. It’s a widely known problem that cows rarely have high-speed Internet connections at home, and most libraries in the speciesist Amerikkkan public library system don’t allow cows to use the “freely available” computers. Blatant discrimination, but what can you do?

    (Can you tell I’m getting a little punchy?)

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  3. Celia

    oops, sorry. I was refering to the fact that (to me) I see four list dots and only three things listed. I was wondering if the third one (which is empty to my eyes) was a seperate catagory. And while I’m being annoying and nit picky, you’ve got a 1993 where you want 2003. 🙂

    I would say, “but I only proofread like that because it was my job for so long!” but really, it was only my job because I did it anyways. 😉

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  4. Jed

    Heh—that there empty bullet was meant to symbolize all those who’ve died waiting for a response to a submission…. Um, I mean, it was a typo in my HTML, which I somehow failed to see after looking at the posted entry. Some proofreader I am. Same with the 1993. Embarrassing, is what it is.

    But thank you for pointing it out! Fixed now.

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  5. John Borneman

    Oh, Jed. You would have thought you’d learned your lesson after the great Zombie Unicorn incident. Do realize that now the OWW has to have a “Cow Written Story” challenge and send the result to you?

    [grin]

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