Interesting statistics:<\/p>\n
I've started tracking author gender (to the extent that it's possible to guess based on names and other information) for submissions in our database.<\/p>\n
In the first three months of 2003, we received 644 submissions. Of those, at least 60% were by men, at least 34% were by women, and 6% were by authors whose genders I'm not sure of.<\/p>\n
So somewhere between 1\/3 and 2\/5 of the stories we've received so far this year were written by women. (Or, to put it another way, the number of subs by men is one-and-a-half to two times the number by women.) That's higher than the roughly 20% that I think GVG said he gets at F&SF,<\/cite> but it's not the 50% that I would've guessed a few months ago.<\/p>\n The numbers for the first three months of 2002 are roughly comparable. In that period, stories by men: 56%; stories by women: 31%; unknown author gender: 13%. (I've put more effort recently into figuring out author genders where it's not immediately obvious from their names.)<\/p>\n For the first three months of 2001: 53% by men, 28% by women, 18% unknown.<\/p>\n That 2001 unknowns percentage is high enough to make it hard to draw useful comparisons. But it's certainly plausible to guess that the percentages have been holding roughly steady. When I did a very rough informal count in June of 2002, the numbers came out almost exactly the same as the more formal first-quarter-of-2003 numbers cited above.<\/p>\n Oh, and overall numbers since we first started taking subs: 57% by men, 29% by women, 14% unknown.<\/p>\n Too sleepy to draw any conclusions. Perhaps in an editorial or article at some point, with some more number-crunching to back it up.<\/p>\n (I was going to post an entry explaining why I'm so sleepy, but I got sidetracked. That'll have to wait for another time too.)<\/p>\n