ladybusiness | Coverage of Women on SF/F Blogs (2012)

Entry tags:

Coverage of Women on SF/F Blogs (2012)

Sections

Observations on Claims of Progressive Reading Choices

This project is about the visibility of women in science fiction and fantasy reviews and whether the gender of the reviewer impacts that visibility.

It's not about reading statistics. Of course, when you start talking about reviewing, reading obviously informs the process of reviewing. It's hard to separate the two, so to explain: this year, like last year, our data came from reviews following a predefined list of inclusion rules instead of reading lists. Again: this project is about the visibility of women in science fiction and fantasy reviews and whether the gender of the reviewer impacts that visibility. What do any differences in the gender of authors reviewed mean? What's influencing any dichotomy we see when we look at data like this? What about the current structure of publishing, marketing, the reviewing community, and our specific cultures, causes this spread of numbers?

I have a deep-seated frustration with any debate about reading statistics. Earlier this year, Aidan from A Dribble of Ink posted an essay titled A Personal Challenge: Gender Balance in 2013. Nowhere in his post does he indict anyone for their reading choices.

With the first comment, the conversation was derailed from Aidan's goal and his personal reasons for choosing to set that goal for himself. What followed was yet another discussion about gender parity in reading, complete with defensive reactions from people whose reading habits weren't, at any point, ever invoked.

This behavior mirrors some of the commentary we received last year even though our study wasn't about reading, so it looks like there's every possibilitiy we're going to end up leading our feminist ponies to the same poisoned, Sexism 101 watering hole. In Aidan's post and our study last year, some claimed that gender blindness or related, completely imaginary skills freed them from any and all social, cultural, or internalized tendency to devalue or ignore women's contributions, and therefore, freed them from needing to critically analyze their reading choices. And of course, if they are exempt from examining reading choices, they're also exempt from examining reviewing choices.

This is not the first time I've seen one person's personal pledge treated as a targeted judgment against other people. It's not the first time I've seen men ignite the argument by being defensive. I find the argument of gender blindness suspect. I find most arguments about whether gender impacts someone's reading choices oblivious at best, and a bunch of dressed up, internalized, misogynistic malarky at worst, like we're some kind of post-feminist society and people making these claims sit on the board of High Overlords of Genre Progressives.

I rarely see general disinterest. I rarely see things like "That's cool, bro! Good luck!", followed, in my magical fantasy land, with some recommendations of books by ladies attached. What usually results from these "I just read whatever I want!" proclamations is more insidious. "I don't see/care about gender." gets attached as an faux-progressive rider and the resulting calls of bullshit on that antiquated gem leads to these people just chomping at the bit to prove they just read what interests them. They claim they don't make it about gender in exceedingly creative, offensive verbal acrobatics that erases the very real struggle a lot of women in genre communities are still dealing with. So we have to live with the bile of defensive arguments foaming from the mouths of otherwise level-headed reviewers as they transform into Misogyny Monsters and start flipping tables because they have never learned to stop and think about why their first response is to grow defensive or disclaim their position. It's as if they've never learned to stop and listen. Women can face problems in every step: getting published, read, listened to. It can be a trial to be heard as widely as their male counterparts; to write, or do, or say something and watch everyone walk past it for the same thing written, done or said by one man, or two, or three. Listening is a key component in learning new and fascinating things about people who have different life experiences from you. Listening is a progressive act. Gender blindness is not.

To quote a post that really helped me contextualize my racist worldview: "BLIND is not a moral positive. BLIND is an inability to perceive what the non-blind people around you can clearly fucking see. [...] And there is actually such a thing as race. If you can't see it, you're not doing yourself or anyone else any favors." My culture told me my entire life to not "see" race, as a solution to the inequality where I live in the rural, American South. But that's not a solution because it allows us to ignore problems and sidelines productive discussion. It's the easy way to not deal with a difficult problem in which the people doing the ignoring are culpable.

In the context of that argument, I also take issue with "I just read what interests me!", and its related follow-ups: "I don't want to read a book because of someone's junk"; "Only men write what I'm into."; "I just want to read a good story"; "I don't cater to the whims of the PC police"; "reading quotas are dumb!"; and "the only reading requirement should be quality!". There's more and I could go on, but suffice it to say I find all of those strawman arguments, meant to derail the actual conversation and invite congratulations about how awesome these people are for single handedly solving the gender issue, about as compelling as the idea of putting my face into a meat grinder.

If you're not used to doing so, thinking about interests themselves as being gendered and what that means for the interests people claim they use to choose their reading material is difficult. Many people use the blindness argument and stop. They don't consider the entire life of a story and its creator. They don't consider the entire publishing process and biases inherent in the gatekeepers. They don't consider how marketing is such a crapshoot and how X story that matches their X interests might be marketed away from them based on the gender bias inherent in the system. They don't consider that a book that might interest them could be given a cover, that, when paired with a woman's name, means they won't touch it, without even realizing they're dismissing it. Jim Hines been has been proving for months sexism in marketing exists and that marketing matters. People simply don't consider whether we, from the moment we emerge a wailing ball of blank brain tissue ripe for social and cultural marketing, are punched in the metaphorical face with gender essentialism that shapes who we are, what we're interested in, and which voices we trust to recommend us the culture we consume.

Asking people to think deeply about where their books are coming from, how hard it might have been for those books to get published, how they found the book and the possible biases inherent in the channels which led to their discovery, and why women are sometimes absent is terrifying. If you've ever tried to have a conversation about gender in SF/F fandom involving people outside your social group, you know what I mean. It's like inviting six angry poltergeists into your home filled with handcrafted family heirlooms passed down for multiple generations: everything gets broken, including your capacity to discuss anything more mentally taxing than adorable gifs of baby animals for weeks.

This project is about the visibility of women in science fiction and fantasy reviews. It's not about reading statistics or the judgment of reading statistics. If you feel defensive when gender parity is a topic, instead of lashing out to defend your reading choices, ask yourself why you feel that way and what you're actually defending and whether it's real, or just a mirage created by the privileges surrounding you. Don't clamor and blow hot air claiming progressive stances that simply do not exist.

— Renay

Our Sample and Methodology

Project thesis: when looking at a sample of bloggers reviewing SF/F, a majority of men will skew toward reviewing more men. A majority of women will skew toward a more equal gender parity, or the opposite in which they review a majority of women. There will be a handful of outliers.

The sites we used:

Last year's data was collected through snowball sampling; this year's data was collected via randomization in order to improve our process. The obvious disadvantage of having changed our sampling method is that comparisons between last year's results and this year's must be done with extreme caution. However, the advantages of using randomization outweigh any problems: a properly randomised sample, drawn from a sampling frame, allows us to generalize our results to the wider SF/F reviewing community with much more confidence than before.

In other words, last year we came up with our sample by asking one another and some of our fellow reviewers for recommendations of speculative fiction blogs, and this meant that it was possible that all those blogs that we and our friends read or knew about had something in common, a hidden variable that might influence the results in unpredictable ways¹. Using a randomised sample this year means that unless the numbers are a complete fluke (which may be unlikely but is never impossible in science — for example, our sample could have accidentally picked up all the blogs where people review a lot of works by women — and it's why replicating studies matters), anyone else who repeats our work using a different sample from the same time period should get very similar results. In fact, we invite anyone interested in doing that to please go ahead. We feel that this confidence in our results is worth the problems surrounding direct comparisons between this year and last that a change in sampling method causes.

Our point of departure was the English language section of the Grasping for the Wind list of SFF blogs, with inactive blogs removed (we defined "active" as having at least 5 posts in the last 3 months). Publisher and bookstore blogs were also removed, as were news aggregator sites that don't post reviews. This list was complemented with a search on Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Ask for SFF blogs using various keyword combinations to avoid self-selection bias (bloggers asking to be included on the original Grasping for the Wind list), since that has the potential to skew the results. This additional step allowed us to have more confidence in our sampling process. Relying on search engines did limit us to blogs visible enough to be found by them; however, this suits the purposes of the project because we're concerned with the visibility of reviews of SF/F by women.

From the initial list and research, we created a sampling frame of 133 science fiction and fantasy blogs. We pulled two sets of 25 numbers from the list (removing duplicates when necessary) from random.org. We pulled 25 blogs from the sampling frame using the first set of numbers. In the cases where the blog turned out to be subsequently closed before or during compilation, newly inactive since the list was compiled, comprised of SF/F content but not prose book reviews, or inaccessible due to technical issues, we substituted a number from the second list. This was done to prevent us from choosing a blog ourselves if we ran into problems with the initial 25 blogs: instead, we would have another truly random selection drawn from the sampling frame. A total of seven blogs were substituted.

When collecting the data, we followed the same rules as last year:
1. Prose science fiction and fantasy fiction material in all related marketing categories only.
2. Fantastical horror (demons, magic, ghosts, etc.) is included, but psychological horror (torture, gore, etc.) is excluded. Horror listings may contain mistakes or oversights due to the fluid nature of this genre.
3. Comics and graphic novels are excluded as artist inclusion is too complicated and time-consuming for us at this time.
4. Young Adult work is included, but other marketing categories for children are excluded.
5. Anthologies are included by contributing authors.
6. Writers under a public, shared pseudonym are counted individually.
7. Co-authors were counted individually.
8. Guest posts from those who were not regular contributors to a blog were not included.
9. Authors can be counted multiple times if reviewed at different times in different entries.

As always, corrections are welcome.

2012's Data

The compilation of our data is available in this Google document.

Chart: Authors reviewed by gender: total

Authors reviewed by gender: total
Reviews of women: 42%
Reviews of men: 57%
Reviews of author where gender is unknown: 1%

Chart: Authors reviewed by gender: group blogs

Authors reviewed by gender: group blogs
Reviews of women: 31%
Reviews of men: 68%
Reviews of author where gender is unknown: 1%

Chart: Authors reviewed by gender: male reviewers

Authors reviewed by gender: male reviewers
Reviews of women: 25%
Reviews of men: 74%
Reviews of author where gender is unknown: 1%

Chart: Authors reviewed by gender: female reviewers

Authors reviewed by gender: female reviewers

Reviews of women: 58%
Reviews of men: 42%
Reviews of authors where gender is unknown: 0%

Authors reviewed by blog, sorted by gender of blogger

Footnotes

¹ We're disclosing this for the sake of scientific honesty; not because we believe that the results from last year are hugely flawed. Indeed, the fact that there's no huge disparity between last year's numbers and this year's suggests they have external validity despite the problems inherent to the sampling method.

Discussion of 2012 Data

Comments are also welcome here, or you can direct inquiries to thisisladybusiness@gmail.com.

You can link to and quote from this post without asking, however, please do not reproduce the post elsewhere without our permission. You can link directly to the data portion of this post with http://ladybusiness.dreamwidth.org/46742.html#data

Feel free to join in or follow the discussion on Twitter at #LadiesinSFF

Comment Policy

We have one; please follow it.

Supplemental Material

How to Suppress Women's Writing: "GLOTOLOG, n., colloq. Intergalactic, current: Information control without direct censorship."

Coverage of Women on SF/F Blogs (2011): "But reviewing and talking about titles on public blogs and journals is an active decision that we're making every time we put a book down and go, 'I'm going to write 1000 words about that and share it with the Internet!'"

Everyone Can Promote Equality In Genre Writing: "Problem solved? The mighty sword of feminism defeats the evil patriarchy? Sorry, no. Because deliberate sexism doesn’t cause this any more than it causes the wider under-representation of women writers in anthologies and across publishing lists."

The erasure of women writers in sf & fantasy: "Again, I'm not trying to suggest that the men involved are deliberately excluding women writers. I am saying that when they do not think about it, they privilege criteria which cause them to select and promote male writers rather than female writers."

Summary of comments for SF Signal's Russ Pledge post: "6. I never consider gender when reading. Books stand on their own merits. My purely personal taste is formed in a vacuum entirely unaffected by any social forces around me and the exact same vacuum surrounds decisions about what gets published and how it gets marketed and what constitutes good aesthetics or important content."

"Male. Female. Or Otherwise." by Mazarkis Williams: "My advice to anyone who buys books based on ‘default’ gender assumptions is to stop it. You are probably wrong, and missing something."

Female Invisibility Bingo: "Back with the point, why does it matter who gets reviewed, who wins awards, who gets anthologized? Because those things will eventually make up his-story. So when people come to look back because, for example, they have been asked to name their all-time favorite SF book, they will only remember the books that history tells them about. The others will be forgotten, and become invisible."

VIDA Count 2012: Mic Check, Redux: "Improvements will happen with effort, not accidentally or by ignoring the glaring disparities."

Female Invisibility — Some Numbers: I can only speak for myself, but I’m pretty sure that most trans women will be able to report, from personal experience, that being brought up male means you are taught to discount women’s opinions. Until we stop that, the data reported by VIDA will not change.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Renay, "Observations on Claims of Progressive Reading Choices" is brilliant. Those arguments are so frustrating that I have a hard time sitting down and explaining why they're just so wrong, and you've done that in a way that both asks people to reevaluate their worldviews respectfully and not let them get away with their blindness. My metaphorical hat is off to you.

Applause for "Observations on Claims of Progressive Reading Choices"! Brilliant explanation of what this is and is not, and reasoned takedown of the more frustrating arguments that I'm sure got/will get/are always lobbed at such a project.

If you've ever tried to have a conversation about gender in SF/F fandom involving people outside your social group, you know what I mean. It's like inviting six angry poltergeists into your home filled with handcrafted family heirlooms passed down for multiple generations: everything gets broken, including your capacity to discuss anything more mentally taxing than adorable gifs of baby animals for weeks.

That is so true that I whimpered a little. *sob!laugh*

Thanks so much for commenting you two - we appreciate the support so much.

I just wanted to say a quick thank you for compiling the data and posting this study.

You're welcome!

Hi, can we link this at metanews?

Yep, fair game. :)

Would you like ladybusiness to be added to our blanket permissions list? I feel like we're quite often asking you guys for permission.

That's a great idea; go ahead! Hopefully it will save you all some work. :)

Cool, thank you.

After last year, I'm glad to see that you've done this again, though a more direct comparison to last year's data would be interesting. Did the discussion from last year result in any change? I noticed that my blog went from about 20% female authors in 2011 to 35% in 2012, which is certainly an improvement (according to the numbers you used). I wonder if any other blogs showed any change.

Anyway, it's always an interested discussion and unfortunate that it need to happen repeatedly.

-Ken
Neth Space

Yes, comparisons would be easier if we'd stuck to the same sampling method, but as we explained in the methodology section, using randomisation and having more confidence that our results are truly representative beats direct comparison by far. It's important to keep in mind that even if we had used the same sampling method, we'd probably not be using the exact same blogs - if we did, the study would become about those blogs in particular rather than about overall trends in the community, which are what concerns us here. It's excellent that your gender ratio improved since last year, and if other blogs' did too, hooray. But this year's study shows that you still find pretty much the same ratio as last year if you take a random sample - and if women writers are to become more visible, this is where we need to see change. We don't want to see change ONLY in the people who were directly involved in the discussion last year, because as awesome as that may be, it has limited impact.

Thanks for continuing to do this. It's a valuable resource.

Thanks for letting us know you find it useful.

I'm an outlier. This does not surprise me. Of my 2012 reviews approx 1/3 were by women and approx 2/3 were by men. hmmm... unless 1/3 2/3 split is considered "more even"?

Thanks for involving my blog, Little Red Reviewer in this project.

Thank you for beginning to follow us.

Wow, a lot of work went into this. Kudos!
Now you have me curious as to my own ratio of reviews of books by male vs. female authors. I read a lot of SF/F YA and that seems dominated by women right now.

Thanks!
Angela
SciFiChick.com

Hi, your blog was actually included in this project. If you click through to the Google data sheet just before the charts you can see which sheet your data was collect in.

Ah, I see that now. Thanks! 83 female to 71 male authors reviewed sounds pretty good to me. Surprisingly fairly even. And interesting seeing the details of the other sites as well. Thanks again for all your hard work!

Angela
SciFiChick.com

If we take into account the percentage of female sci-fi writers compared to male sci-fi writers as taken from here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_speculative_fiction), we get that there are roughly 1.7 times as many male as female authors, so the total presented means that, on average, 1.3 times as many reviews are of male novels as female novels.

So female authors make up about a third of all science fiction writing and get about two fifths of all science fiction coverage which means that, on average, every female author individually gets more attention and mention than her male peer.

Why are you assuming the ratio of female to male sf and fantasy writers is the same in 2013 as it was in 1999?

For that matter, an analysis of the membership of SFWA is not nearly as good an indicator of the number of books published by gender as actually looking at the number of books published. You don't need to re-qualify for SFWA membership once you've qualified, so people who haven't been published for twenty years are just as likely to be members as people who published this year. Nor does every science fiction or fantasy writer join the organization. The membership is not necessarily an accurate reflection of the current makeup of the field.

Edited (Added discussion of SFWA membership vs. book publication) 2013-03-16 18:12 (UTC)

So there may be more (or fewer) female authors than that number, sure. The fact remains that this article completely disregards the publication rates for both genders---a factor which, if we use the 1999 numbers, shows a skewing toward female authors, and may very well indicate little to no skewing in one direction or another.

It's possible (and likely) that female authors have it rough, but this numbers presented here have too little context to show that. There are a lot of factors impacting which books get reviewed, including publication company pressure, book popularity, book availability, and reader interest. Drawing a line directly from reviewer gender to author gender seems ignorant at best and duplicitous at worst.

Do you have accurate and up to date data about those publication ratios? If so, please do share. Until then, I don't see how taking speculations into account is going to make our data project any better.

And yes, there are several factors impacting which books get reviewed - we're merely suggesting that gender is one of them.

It's also quite possible that lack of reviews of books by women is part of the reason why there are fewer female writers in SF. Why try to break in if fandom makes it hard (reviews themselves would be a fairly small part of that)? There's a feedback loop that's hard to break of lack of support in publishing due to lack of sales which results in fewer attempts to publish with results in less stuff published which results in lack of support which ...

Bias by reviewers by no means is the main culprit, but we all have a part to play. All participants in this cycle should be doing something to correct the problem. Putting the onus on everyone else to take the first step means that the problem never gets corrected.

I appreciate your feedback! However, please sign all future comments as per our comment policy. :)

As a feminist thinker, I'm grateful for the work you've done here. As a fantasy/sci fi writer about to release my first book in a series, I'm saddened, upset - but also, I feel reinvigorated to fight to be seen and heard. I will not be silenced!

Thanks so much for your support, it means a lot. Hopefully the more visibility the results gain the more people in the blogging community will start to rally around female writers - I believe in bloggers (while still having seen some depressing reactions to our study).

Hi there,

Thanks so much for doing this research! I found out about this survey from Cat Rambo's site.

I challenged myself to write 40 book reviews in 2012 and make my reading choices as gender-equal as possible. I also did a statistical breakdown of what I rated, and how. I think my post would be of interest, if you'd like to learn more: http://christinavasilevski.com/blog/2012-book-reviews/

Thanks!

Christina Vasilevski

Didn't see this last year, but thanks for taking the time to crunch the numbers. The information here is compelling. A helpful spur for me to think about my own biases when reading and writing.

I am including this in my now turning omnibus linkage to a subject which has always interested me.

I am including it in the LJ of the same name and will crosspost (I am not usually in my DW, but might be changing that custom...)...my omnibus linkage.

I have also linked to a couple of the blogposts you've noted here ( but not all) and to a paragraph as an example of what you've written about..

Thanks for the work! I appreciate it.

Thanks for doing this study. It's revealing and kind of depressing.

In one of my classes this past semester, we spent several weeks talking about ways to generate random numbers, and I couldn't quite resist sharing. Have you considered using random.org's random sequence generator? It would shuffle the list of blogs into a completely random order. In effect that's the result of the randomization procedure described above, but simpler and with less bookkeeping. Going down the shuffled list in order until you had 25 blogs that fit the criteria (including replacements for the blogs that went inactive after sampling) would give just as random a sample as the procedure described.

The DIY method is to use Random.org's decimal fraction generator.

1. Generate 1 number for each blog.
2. Sort the blogs according to the number generated in step 1.

I wouldn't be surprised if random.org's random sequence generator uses this procedure to shuffle sequences. Hopefully this gives you some easier ways to randomize your sample next year, though this year's procedure was valid, just slightly cumbersome.

Hi!

Generally when working with numbers of any kind, I choose what is a more cumbersome method because of my learning disability in order to not confuse and frustrate myself. I thought about using the sequence tool, but it got really overwhelming when I tested it out. I ended up confusing my numbers (I often see double digit numbers backwards, or substitute certain numbers with each other, like seven and four). By doing the numbers individually, I never threw a bunch of numbers in my face all at once (which is what the sequence tool does), which was probably more work, but definitely kept my anxiety levels down. :)

Makes sense. My disabilities require minimizing the number of steps, but that's me. I was just over-excited by the thought that myclaswork could be useful outside my discipline.

I've never studied survey design, so I really appreciated the clear explanation of what and how.

I am so excited to have found this while reading through Fantasy Cafe's Women in Sci-fi/Fantasy series. I have been considering doing this exact thing, and truth be told, am thrilled to see someone has already kicked it off and has two years of trending data to pull from!

I made a similar effort earlier this week using amazon.com as a primary source of data and I am surprised to see the number align very closely, though it seems there is a bit more parity in the blogs you reviews (I found 37% for women, 63% for men). You can see my data here: http://www.kferrin.com/the-facts-on-gender-and-book-reviews/

I am very interested in continuing to monitor this on an annual basis to measure whether our collective efforts have any material effect. Do you plan on continuing this project?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Coverage of Women on SF/F Blogs (2012)

Sections

Observations on Claims of Progressive Reading Choices

Our Sample and Methodology

2012's Data

Footnotes

Discussion of 2012 Data

Comment Policy

Supplemental Material

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

I'm happy to see you did this again

Re: I'm happy to see you did this again

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

Wow.

Re: Wow.

I did a similar experiment with my own book reviews in 2012

Great Post!

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

Bravo on this effort!