Gender balance in some old anthologies

Interim report on my father's sf anthologies:

25 sf anthologies recorded in my spreadsheet so far, published from 1953 through 1984.

Total number of stories: 331; average of 13+ stories per book. (Not counting nonfiction or poetry.)

Total number of stories by women: 18.5 (the .5 is a story co-written by a man and a woman); average of <1 story by a woman per book.

Two of those anthologies each contain two stories by women. All the rest have no more than one apiece.

Some caveats:

  • Not totally certain that all of those anthologies were my father's; there may be a couple that were originally mine on the list.
  • And there may be a couple that I marked as having been mine that were actually originally his, and those ones tend to have much higher percentages of stories by women.
  • I didn't include the non-sf anthologies, which had much higher percentages. (12% for one, 42% for the other.)
  • I left out two post-1984 anthologies, which had much higher percentages. (12-14%! ~amazingly high!~)
  • I'm going by author name and/or editor-chosen pronouns to guess binary author gender, which may not be accurate. (I have no way of knowing what gender any of these authors considered themselves to be.)

I was expecting that the lone woman would be consistent across many books (and would be mostly Le Guin or McCaffrey, depending on era), but there are actually several of them. Examples:

  • E. M. Hull (who the editor names as “Mrs. Edna Mayne (Hull) Van Vogt”)
  • Evelyn E. Smith
  • Valentina Zhuravleva
  • Jane Rice
  • Kit Reed
  • Miriam Allen de Ford
  • Anne McCaffrey
  • Pamela Zoline
  • C. C. Rössel-Waugh
  • Carol Emshwiller

(See also Facebook thread for this post.)

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