Strange Horizon's annual SF Count for 2015

Strange Horizons has posted Niall Harrison's annual SF Count. I quote here from their press release:

Strange Horizons' sixth annual "SF Count" - an in-depth exploration of gender and racial representation in SF reviewing - is published today, and finds that although there is some evidence of improvement in some of the 18 magazines and journals surveyed, overall 9 out of 10 books reviewed are by white writers, and 6 out of 10 books reviewed are written by men. A similar disparity is seen in the demographics of reviewers.

This year, Strange Horizons worked with data designer E. G. Cosh to develop visualisations of the SF Count findings. The full results are available on the Strange Horizons website and as an embeddable Tableau dataset (links below). Gifs describing the methodology and the topline results are attached with this press release.

Some notable points from the survey:

* The venues most likely to review books by women or non-binary writers were The Cascadia Subduction Zone (80% of reviews), Romantic Times (57%) and Lightspeed (57%). The least likely were Asimov's (23%), Science Fiction Studies (21%), and Analog (17%)

 * The venues most likely to review books by writers of colour were Lightspeed (50%), The Cascadia Subduction Zone (35%) and Strange Horizons (22%). The least likely were Science Fiction Studies (4%), Analog (4%), Foundation (3%), and Risingshadow.net (1%).

* The venues with the most women and non-binary reviewers were Romantic Times (91%), The Cascadia Subduction Zone (88%), and Tor.com (63%).

 * The venues with the most reviewers of colour were Lightspeed (67%), The Cascadia Subduction Zone (41%), and Tor.com (22%).

 * The most active venues in the field were Locus (324 reviews), SFX (165 reviews), and Romantic Times (141 reviews); the least active were The Los Angeles Review of Books (35 reviews), Lightspeed (28 reviews), and The Cascadia Subduction Zone (23 reviews).

* The venues with the largest reviewing staffs were Strange Horizons (80 reviewers), Science Fiction Studies (38 reviewers), and SFX (30 reviewers); at the other end of the scale, Asimov's and Lightspeed had 3 reviewers each, Risingshadow.net has 2, and Analog has 1.

*****

This year's SF Count will mean different things to different people. My own personal takeaway is that although The Cascadia Subduction Zone's circulation figures remain disappointing, our work is not yet done.

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."