Lorem Ipsum

I've updated my Hugo fiction-author gender page with the new nominees.

I'm surprised and pleased to see that, for the first time ever, over 60% of the fiction nominees were written by women.

This is also the third consecutive year in which 50% or more of the fiction nominees were written by women. There were two consecutive years in the early '90s, but this is the first time there've been three.

This year is a little odd, in that four of the fiction nominees are by the same woman, writing under two different names. However, there've been plenty of past years in which multiple nominees have been written by the same person; my stats are about percentage of works written by women, not about percentage of authors who are female.

It's also interesting that this is (I think) the fourth consecutive year in which the number of nominating ballots has set a new record. I'm very pleased to see the numbers going up; as recently as 2007, only 400 people nominated, and now we're over 1300. I'm tempted to say that the increase in nominations of women correlates with the increase in nominating ballots, but I think there's too little data to say that for sure yet. Still, two pleasing trends.

One more gender note: I believe this is the first time since 1986 that a woman has been nominated in the Best Pro Artist category! Way to go, Julie Dillon!