Is SF and Fantasy Really dominated by Male Writers...or Are the Awards Dominated by Male Writers?

[alfreda89]

In an interview, Tanya Huff beautifully blows this constant comment out of the water. I have to agree with her. I don't make a big deal out of it, but probably 80% of the writers I currently look forward to and read are women genre writers. (Part of that 20% includes Steve Miller, of Lee & Miller.)

"Science fiction is thought to be generally male dominated, so why do you think this is?

Is it? I grew up in the 1970's reading Andre Norton and Anne McCaffery and Marion Zimmer Bradley and Zena Henderson and Joanna Russ and Ursula K. LeGuin. Then I read C J Cherryh and Vonda McIntyre and Diane Duane and Barbara Hambly and Pat Murphy and Janet Kagan. Then I read Elizabeth Moon and Julie Czernada and Melissa Scott and Lois McMaster Bujold. And those are just the science fiction writers I read, the fantasy list is a lot longer. So if there's a perception that science fiction is male dominated, it's not one I share. My short story editors have been both male and female but my novels have only ever had female editors. My publisher is female.

Are SF awards male dominated? They certainly seem to be. Maybe it's because the core group who nominate and vote are men but I have no idea why that is when clearly so many women are both working in and enjoying the genre."

Comments

[mevennen.livejournal.com]

Which awards? I ask because we got a bucketload for being a mainly female jury on the Clarke's, which had an all-male shortlist and a male finalist (all well deserved). We had a shortfall of female-written works for the Clarke's, for Catch22 reasons which Juliet McKenna and myself have outlined. This year I'm on the WFA jury and will need, when all the books are in, to have a look at the numbers.

[alfreda89.livejournal.com]

The Clarke has been doing a great job of this, and I think the WFC tries to read everything, too. I suspect Tanya is referring to the Hugo and Nebula Awards, which can easily come down to popularity contests. The more often you appear on the short form, the more often you may make a ballot just because you made the ballot last year. That the story is also good doesn't mean it's one of the five best of the year. (And can we now say, how to you narrow down to five? The Oscars have given up on that number.)

I preferred when we could just nominate things that impressed us, and everything above a certain number made the short list for voting. I saw more variety with that system, I think.

[mevennen.livejournal.com]

Off the top of my head, WFA subs are probably at a higher % of female to male so far, but we're nowhere like all in yet.

[aberwyn.livejournal.com]

The Hugo and Nebula wins are the ones publishers like to splash across the winners' covers, too. I think they do "count" disproportionately in the minds of the fans (as opposed to casual readers of the genres) partly because they're used to seeing them on those book covers.

I remember one set of Nebs, many years ago now, where Kim Stanley Robinson was the only male winner. The male SF writers on the old Genie SFRT flipped out about it. Some came right out and accused women of voting only on the basis of gender or badgering people to vote for various women. They refused to believe that those stories and novels were considered the best.