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This post is a follow-up to my first post about the issue of the gender disparity in science fiction, which you may want to read first for context.
One important thing to keep in mind, if you’re going to argue that some or all of the disparity in science fiction is due to discrimination by publishers and editors, is that you’ll need a lot more than a headcount of published authors or award nominees. First and most obviously, you’ll need to know the number of male and female submissions in different genres and subgenres. Even if the stories submitted by males and females are indistinguishable, one would still expect whichever sex submitted more to dominate both publications and awards, since more submissions would mean more chances for lightning to strike. And, for reasons I’ve already given, it would be rather surprising if most attempts at being published in science fiction were not made by men.
You’d also need to know what those submissions are like, not only in terms of quality but in terms of style, subject, and content. Stories of equal quality are still heterogeneous. A well-written science fiction story with a Heinleinesque writing style revolving around string theory is not the same good as an equally well-written hard science fiction story with a Heinleinesque writing style revolving around neuroscience, or with a Vancian writing style, and so on. If there is some sex disparity in what men and women tend to write about, or in the style they tend to write in, or the genres they prefer, that could also make men more likely to get published or win awards. It might be lamentable that the subjects or styles that draw more women are of less interest to publishers or award committees or readers, but it’s not discrimination, conscious or otherwise, against women qua women. (Unless, of course, these topics or styles are being rejected simply because they are associated with women, rather than because of taste or expected profitability.) It still might be something worth addressing; that’s a different issue.
I don’t blame people who claim the existence of discrimination among publishers for failing to provide this sort of data- they’re not writing a sociology thesis- but without it we’re mostly groping in the dark. The obvious solution, I suppose, would be for some editors to try reading submissions blind and see what happens.
Now, it is not an either/or situation. Even if it is the case that men are more likely to write what publishers and award organizations like, such that they would be disproportionately represented even in the absence of discrimination, it is quite possible that people have taken a generally accurate generalization and over-applied it. That happens all the time, since humans are lazy and it takes time and energy to judge people one individual at a time.
However, I am highly suspicious of the claim that publishers are acting out of sexism, because it requires me to believe that editors and publishers are not only sexist, but value sexism enough to make serious sacrifices in profitability. A similar objection applies to the idea that publishers are discriminating unconsciously. If they were, there’d be an obvious entrepreneurial opportunity for anyone who knows or suspects this to be the case: find as many unjustly unpublished female writers as you can and exploit the fact that you can pay them less since no one else is bidding for them, while maintaining or even increasing the quality of your product. It wouldn’t last, since the price of female writers will be bid up once other people start trying to get in on the action, but for a while you’ll have above-normal profits. Nobody seems to be doing this, and for publisher bigotry to explain that it would be necessary for everyone to be blind to the possibility, decade after decade, which is highly implausible. When an observer on the sidelines thinks that something would be profitable and entrepreneurs who actually have an incentive to get it right don’t, bet on the entrepreneurs. Yes, they could be mistaken, but people are more likely to get things right if they suffer some actual harm from being wrong. (It’s worth noting that what is often held up as the paradigmatic case of proven sex discrimination, orchestra hiring prior to the days of blind auditions, happened in the nonprofit sector.)
In the short story magazines, there may be more of a case for discrimination as an explanation: there are far fewer professional SF magazines than there are book publishers, and the declining fortunes of those publications no doubt discourages new entries to the market. With fewer eyes scanning for opportunities, it’s less implausible that an existing opportunity has been missed. Still, using publisher discrimination to explain the disparity once again requires us to believe that this has somehow been missed for decades.
The claim that the awards are given in a sexist manner does not fall under this objection, since people who vote for awards gain nothing by being fair and lose nothing by being unfair, so I’m more open to the possibility that the awards are sexist. Again, however, a mere headcount of nominees and winners is useless without additional data.
With all that said, there’s a more plausible way for sexism to be an influence. If part of the disparity is the result of bias within the field, it seems much more likely to be the bias of the audience, rather than the publishers. A publisher that decides who to publish based on sex can lose large amounts of money, whereas a reader who is sexist (consciously or unconsciously) in his reading choices suffers merely a diminution in his recreational reading pleasure, and unless he is rejecting utterly brilliant female writers in order to read wretched male hacks his loss is likely to be modest. In short, publishers have a strong incentive to be fair, and readers generally don’t.
There is a bit of anecdotal support for this being an issue. I recall hearing several times (years ago, so I can’t provide a source) that the publisher of hard science fiction author Chris Moriarty tried to exploit her ambiguous first name- they never denied the fact that she was a woman, but they coyly tried not to mention it if they could get around it.
In the absence of strong incentives to avoid it, I would expect a certain amount of reader sexism in any field where one sex is much more common than the other, or where the field is widely thought to be by nature better-suited to a particular sex, and so I’d be rather surprised if there wasn’t bias in book-buying habits from some readers, cutting against different sexes in different genres. On the other had, for reasons explained in my prior post on the issue, in the case of science fiction I think the sex disparity in publishing reflects a real sex disparity in output, so even a perfectly unbiased reader of science fiction would be likely to have a relative dearth of female authors in their book collection. (For which reason I find the ostentatious self-flagellation occasionally performed by bloggers or reviewers proclaiming themselves “part of the problem” for reviewing mostly books by male authors to be fairly absurd.)
That’s all for now. I have some other related thoughts that may coalesce into a post at some point.
I think you’ve hit it on the head.
I’ve been reading (mostly hard) science fiction for 50 years (first time I’ve had that frightening thought), and my extensive SF library is at least 95% male authors. Indeed,, all of my favorite SF authors are male: Larry Niven, Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Vernor Vinge, Bova, Forward, Silverbeg, Baxter, Anderson, Pohl, ….
Why? It’s not a bias toward male writers, or any feeling that SF must be written by men. My first SF experience as a child was written by a woman, Andre Norton, and wonderfully entertaining. It started me on a lifetime of loving SF, and I read (for a while) everything that she wrote.
If anything, I have a bias for hard science fiction–technology based, not touchy-feely–and men tend to write such stories.
Perhaps, at one time, agents and editors tended to take men writers more seriously, because men tended to work as professionals, full time, while more women writers worked in their spare time. And most fiction was bought by men, especially science fiction.
Times have changed. Today, women are 70% of the readership of science fiction and fantasy. Women writers are equally as serious as men in their attempts to be professional writers. Women do write differently: more people-oriented, more fantasy, less engineering and technology oriented.
Most importantly (and as you pointed out), agents and publishers are primarily interested in profit, and if any bias exists, it is toward writers who write the kind of stories that readers buy.
Anything else would be more than irresponsible, it would be stupid.
“while more women writers worked in their spare time.”
I suspect something related may be playing a role today, among up-and-comers trying to get published. One of the biggest factors that holds women back in a great many fields is that women get pregnant and men don’t, and most care for young children in the U.S. (and pretty much all places I’m aware of, except possibly some of Scandinavia) is provided by the mother rather than the father, so women are more likely to have their careers interrupted for several years. To some extent this is less of an issue in writing, since a writer can work at home, but I imagine it can still be an issue- even if she doesn’t work outside the home, it may be hard for a woman with kids to have enough sustained periods of undistracted time to write in peace. Fathers are more likely to work outside the home full-time, but when not at work they may also have more opportunities for quiet and solitude. The father and mother may have the same amount of work, but it’s usually easier for the father to cram all his work into a specific time of day and then have some time unmolested, whereas being the primary caregiver for kids is more likely to mean having your work stretched out in bits and pieces through the entire day. Most women do have children at some point in their lives, and so many women seeking to be writers will have an additional challenge to overcome that most men don’t.
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