2014 SF Count

Niall Harrison has posted his annual SF count for 2014 at Strange Horizons. This is the fifth year he's been compiling a statistical count for gender and race representation in sf reviewing, an issue dear to the Aqueductista heart:

The aim is to draw attention to imbalances in literary coverage.

As the title indicates, the immediate inspiration for this series is "The Count" by VIDA, which started in 2010. Within SF, antecedents include the Broad Universe reviewing statistics calculated for 2000 and 2007, the Lady Business counts of coverage on SF blogs for 2011, 2012, and 2013 and, further back, Joanna Russ' counts as reported in How to Suppress Women's Writing (1983).

This article presents the results of the SF count for 2014. Previous counts are available for 2013, 2012, 2011, and 2010.

You can check out this year's count here. His summary is neither surprising nor encouraging: "As in previous years, in the majority of the SF review venues surveyed, review coverage disproportionately focused on men and books by white writers. A majority of reviews were written by men in two-thirds of venues, and by white people in all venues. Analysis of 2010-2014 gender data shows that despite year-to-year variation within individual venues, there is no evidence for an overall increase in coverage of books authored or edited by women. However, there is some evidence for a small increase in the proportion of reviews written by women."