Sexism in SF
The truth is that 80-90% of Science Fiction readers are male. I'm not talking about movies, TV, comics or games. I am not talking about fantasy or horror. I am talking about Science Fiction with space, the future, aliens or technology. I am not talking about vampires, zombies, demons or other religious references.
The 80-90% figure comes from the published estimated readership of Science Fiction magazines. In order to sell ads, magazines must publish their demographics. Men read most of the science fiction. As a corollary, men write %75 of the science fiction. This is based on estimates from several magazines that have blogged or written about their submissions. Three quarters (or more) of all stories classified as science fiction come from men. Some magazines estimate that nearly 90% of the hard science fiction submitted is from men.
Good writing has no gender bias. There is no indication that any particular gender produces better fiction. If all things are equal, 75% of all science fiction published should match the submission ratio and 75% of published stories should be by men.
My conclusion is that there is something about Science Fiction that appeals to men more than women. This is not a sexist conclusion, it is a statistical interpretation of the facts.
There are magazines, though, that are staffed by women and have 80% of their published stories by women. This runs counter to the statistics, yet they admit that they receive far more stories from men than by women.
Is this evidence of gender bias?
(You can tell that Keith just received another rejection.)
The 80-90% figure comes from the published estimated readership of Science Fiction magazines. In order to sell ads, magazines must publish their demographics. Men read most of the science fiction. As a corollary, men write %75 of the science fiction. This is based on estimates from several magazines that have blogged or written about their submissions. Three quarters (or more) of all stories classified as science fiction come from men. Some magazines estimate that nearly 90% of the hard science fiction submitted is from men.
Good writing has no gender bias. There is no indication that any particular gender produces better fiction. If all things are equal, 75% of all science fiction published should match the submission ratio and 75% of published stories should be by men.
My conclusion is that there is something about Science Fiction that appeals to men more than women. This is not a sexist conclusion, it is a statistical interpretation of the facts.
There are magazines, though, that are staffed by women and have 80% of their published stories by women. This runs counter to the statistics, yet they admit that they receive far more stories from men than by women.
Is this evidence of gender bias?
(You can tell that Keith just received another rejection.)
7 Comments:
You can always create an all male sci fi magazine -- I don't think the women will be lying awake nights over it.
It is either gender bias or the story was no good. I refuse to believe that I wrote a bad story, so it must be the former!
I do believe that there is anti-male bias at some zines. After I am rejected I am justified in resorting to this excuse, whether that is the reason for my rejection or not.
I am the soul of honesty and fairness and I would never create a zine that would eliminate a good writer, either male or female.
As far as women lying awake at night - you are right, they obviously don't care if they are biased or not.
In the future, please take note of sardonic humor before riding in on your high horse.
I agree, I do write food stuff (grin).
I start out at the highest paying markets first. I don't try to target any market. I write mostly mundane sf or weird stories and if a market says slipstream or sf, they get an sf story. If it's a good story I expect them to accept it.
The story had a weak female character who finds strength in her dead son's weird girlfriend. It is entirely too full of emotions to be hard sf, but that's how the story came out. The viewpoint is that of the husband trying to save his marriage.
Since I don't try to target markets, I write what I know and understand. I expect many markets to reject due to lack of sympathy in the style or subject of the story. I think this is the only way to write honestly.
That being said, I also think that some publications try harder to accept female authors. I will try the same set of publications with a female name next time and see if I have better luck.
There are always isms with editors, because they all have their biases...and your story may just have been something that didn't appeal to their bias.
I am not very happy that there are markets that publish primarily women and make no bones about it. If a magazine announced that they would publish only men, there would be an uproar.
On the topic of Rejections:
I usually polish a story after getting editor feedback. This was just the first rejection (it went out to the next zine on the list within minutes of receiving the R.) The story itself is still a bit raw and I will tweak it. There was no feedback or comment on the story from this first market.
I value rejections where the editor spends the time to give feedback. Sometimes it helps, sometimes it doesn't. I just received some feedback on one my trunk items (19 Rs and counting) that told me the story moved too slowly. I knew this, but I don't know how to fix it. Off it went for it's 20th R.
J rejected this last story about two years ago without comment. Tyree made some kind of comment, but I don't always get what Tyree means when he gives writing advice, except that he always wants more commas - Chicago Manual of Style be damned - full commas ahead!.
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