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.
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."
Strange Horizons has just posted Niall Harrison's annual count of review publications in the sf/f field. This year's count looks at race as well as gender, which I'm glad to see. I'm not glad to see, however, that the statistics for 2013 reviews of work by women and women reviewers has remained pretty much flat in comparison with those for 2012. By this point, the gender disparity is becoming hard to explain without reference to internalized sexism.
First off, congratulations to Nicola Griffith! The Lambda Literary Foundation has announced that she is one of two writers being awarded the 2013 James Duggins Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize. The judges commented: "Trebor Healey and Nicola Griffith are both writers who are unafraid to take risks in their writing, stretching the strictures of genre to ask bigger questions. They use the lens of their LGBT experience as a prism through which universal themes of love, society, and the meaning of life are refracted, disassembled and reassembled in ways that are at once challenging and rewarding to the reader. Their work deepens and enriches the tapestry of LGBT literature: worthy of a place in the modern canon of English literature while expanding the notions of what LGBT literature can be."
Also of interest:
--Over at Strange Horizons, Niall Harrison has produced his annual gender statistics fest for reviewing in the sf/f field. I'm sorry to say his results are pretty much what they were last year. Do check them out here.
--The Digital Public Library of America launched last week. Among other things, the site offers its Digital Library Digest, which collects annotated links to news about digital issues as well as about public libraries. The Digest for April 25, 2013, for instance, links to five items, including an announcement from the House Judiciary Panel that they'll be starting "a comprehensive review of copyright law" and an article on Simon & Schuster's pilot library ebook project. The DPLA has an interesting (to me) web address: http://dp.la/.
If a notable woman dies and a major national newspaper doesn't report it, did it actually happen?
Big papers' lists of significant deaths in 2012 overwhelmingly feature men. The Washington Postput 18 women and 48 men on its list. On the other side of the country, the Los Angeles Times listed 36 women and 114 men. And lest you think this is some kind of freak 2012 phenomenon, the New York Times has consistently listed many more men than women over the last five years.
So
is the issue that notable women aren't dying—or that newspapers aren't
reporting it? "We simply choose the most prominent, the most well-known,
the most influential, without regard to race, color, sex, creed," says
Bill McDonald, the editor of obituaries at the Times. "It's a
rearview mirror. The people we write about largely shaped the world of
the 1950s, '60s and, increasingly, the '70s, and those movers and
shakers were—no surprise—predominantly white men."
But
legendary feminist activist Gloria Steinem says that doesn't tell the
whole story. "The standards by which people are chosen still have a
'masculine' skew," Steinem wrote in an email to Mother Jones.
Women who organized and pressured for social progress—like Mothers
Against Drunk Driving, for example—are less likely to get notice,
Steinem says, than men whose success can only be measured in wealth,
like Donald Trump or the Koch Brothers. "Women are more likely to be
credited with the personal than the political—and also put in one silo.
Anything that only affects women is taken less seriously than anything
that also affects men," she says.
Go check out the stunning bar charts. It tells the whole sorry--and oh so familiar-- story.
Niall Harrison and associates have posted a 2011 update to his 2010 report on gender balance in sf reviewing venues. You'll particularly want to check out his bar graphs (with men represented by red and women by blue). This year, by the way, The Cascadia Subduction Zone was included in the count, as well as two additional venues not included last year. Here's the bottom line (bearing in mind that the Locus numbers are skewed by what Niall calls "the Cushman effect"):
Sherwood Smith posted MEN and women a couple of days ago, in which she offers up a few thoughts on the issue of gender balance in reviewing and reviewers of books, an issue that has been considerably clarified by Niall Harrison's statistical analysis. A couple of her points resonated particularly strongly with me. First, she writes:
Harrison himself is a reviewer, sharp and articulate. Our tastes don't often overlap, which has sometimes caused me to ponder on the years that I went away from male-penned reviews thinking that the contrasts in taste meant that I had no taste. When I was growing up, the tastes of men in their thirties and (if famous) older seemed to be the accepted standard.
This point reminded me of how for many years, reading sf magazines and critical publications, I thought I must not be reading sf "correctly." (I thought this though I'd long since rejected the traditional notion that correct aesthetic judgment is absolute and indisputable and not open to individual differences in perception. I just assumed that I must not be "getting" something in sf that everyone else, apparently, was.) More often than not, I couldn't imagine what reviewers and year's best list-makers saw in the works they valued and praised-- and wondered why apparently no one had even noticed the work that I judged interesting and sometimes even brilliant. This constant dissonance was incredibly alienating. And not only that, I figured that same problem must have something to do with the tepid interest my own work received (and the many rejections of stories by editors who characterized them as "fascinating and well-written").
Everything changed for me in late 1996 when I joined the fem-sf list and began posting comments to that list on what I was reading. I discovered that I was not alone. (And that some of the very writers I so respected were reading very much as I did.) Shortly after that, Nicola Griffith and Kelley Eskridge urged me to do more critical writing and reviewing. From the frequent (and often fervent) feedback that resulted when, thanks to the Internet, I began taking my reviews public, I gradually came to understand that the "standard" critical voices in the field were, in fact, not representative of the tastes and values of the entire sf/f readership. What was needed, obviously, was more voices, representing the taste of those whose taste is excluded from the "standard," as Sherwood Smith calls it. Now, thanks to Aqueduct Press, that I'm so frantically busy all the time, it's harder for me to continue writing reviews, and I sometimes think about stopping, but I haven't felt confident that my absence would necessarily be covered by another reviewer with a taste that deviates from the standard. Niall's pie charts demonstrate to me that my intuitive sense was probably correct. I've talked to various people whose voices I'd like to read (more often) in critical venues, but knowing the sacrifice involved in making such a commitment, I haven't felt as if I can really press them.
The second point Sherwood Smith made that particularly interested me was this:
The sense that men write about Important Things and women write about Domestic or Sentimental Things still appears to be pervasive.
Virginia Woolf wrote about this, of course, and the topic has been discussed often since the Second Wave and, more recently, about the spectacle of Jonathan Franzen being lavished with praise for doing "pathbreaking work" when he condescended to write on Domestic Things-- the very kind of writing that women have long been despised for producing. (It's always "new," of course, and "bold" when a man takes up an idea or innovation or usual practice of women.) But what struck me this time in thinking about this was that the problem could also be seen as one afflicting reviewers as well as novelists. What reviewers review has as much to do with shaping their reputations and establishing the degree of their critical authority as the quality of their reviews do. My experience as a reviewer has included a mix of books assigned to me by the editor and books I've chosen, with assignments predominating. Some editors might assign books to particular reviewers at random, but it's more likely that they'll match books to reviewers according to their (largely intuitive) ideas about the reviewers. Sometimes the criteria might have to do with areas of interest, but I suspect that the books the editor considers the most "important" will usually be assigned to the reviewers the editor considers the most authoritative. I became a reviewer for Strange Horizons when Niall invited me to review Charles Stross's Glasshouse-- and explicitly said he'd like my review of it because he hadn't yet "seen a serious review [of it] by a feminist critic." That was in 2006, and I still occasionally receive notes thanking me for the review I then wrote. But most of the books I review have been by women. I was, for instance, thrilled to be assigned the Shirley Jackson Library of America volume. In my judgment, that book is an Important Work. But I can't help thinking that although the book received attention at the time of its release, that was largely because a genre writer had received the honor of being given a volume in that series--and not because her work is, in itself, considered Important. (And in fact quite a few mainstream literary critics expressed surprise and disapproval that it had been selected for the series.)
In thinking about this a bit more, it occurred to me that my approach to reviewing is rather like my approach to publishing-- and thus, in a sense, almost guaranteed marginality. If you are someone with ambitions for becoming a major critic in the field and also have the critical and writing chops to achieve such an ambition, the most sensible thing to do would be to review the books that can be assumed--in advance of their publication-- to garner the most attention. (These, of course, are the Important books.) The upshot is, my primary goal as a reviewer is at odds with the formula for success. This is, of course, the story of my life. But more to the point, I think it's also the story for any critic whose taste isn't in line with the standard and has no wish to betray that taste.
My conclusion? We need to be hearing a wider variety of critical voices. The voices of women, the voices of people of color, the voices of people who aren't US or UK nationals. I'm hoping, of course, that you will be hearing a wider range of voices in the Cascadia Subduction Zone. But I'd really like some of this blog's regular readers to think seriously about adding their own voices to the mix. Please?
Following the examples of VIDA, Niall Harrison does the gender balance numbers for science fiction on the Strange Horizons blog, with The SF Count. "The good news." he writes, "is that we're not more imbalanced than the mainstream venues; that bad news is that we're not really any less imbalanced, either."
Sort of makes it clear why it's a major occasion for Aqueduct Press when any of its books gets reviewed. The red and blue pie charts are absolutely brilliant.
I work with a newly formed non-profit group known as VIDA: Women in Literary Arts and Letters (vidaweb.org), and this is what we do - find ways to quantify, discuss, dissect and "disintermediate" (as Mr. Jackson put it) the work of those gatekeepers, and listmakers and other cultural production monetizers and arbiters out there in the world of arts and letters. The Atlantic can definitely be counted as one of those arbiters, so I read it regularly. VIDA formed in response to a dilemma women writers of all genres face: the lack of balanced representation in publishing and literary awards and colloquia.
Last year, founder Cate Marvin sent out an email entitled, "As I Stand Here Folding Laundry" to a group of friends that resonated with enough women writers that it went viral, appearing on listservs and blogs and generally putting a finger on an issue that had gone unfingered, serving as a call to action to address the dearth of consideration given to the cultural production of women writers. Last year's Publisher's Weekly Best-Of debacle in which they included an astounding (drumroll, please) ZERO writers of the female persuasion, and their follow-up defense that the world is now--I'm not sure what to call it? Post-sexism? Beyond the need to examine one's own motives and biases when declaring material superlative?--underscored the urgency of this mission.
Dixson begins her post by saying that Chris Jackson's All the Sad Young Literary Women peeved her and prompted her to send the link to Jackson's post out to her women friends and colleagues for feedback.
--A related post, at Beatrice.com, Ron Hogan's Franzenfreude Is Only the Tip of the Iceberg, asks "Should a book review section be 'news about the culture' as Sam Tanenhaus called it, or the special snowflake appreciation corner?" More particularly, he takes aim, with Jennifer Weiner and Jodi Picoult, at the New York Times Book Review (and the mainstream reviewing establishment generally) for idolizing Jonathan Franzen-- the Great While Male Novelist du jour.
Weiner and Picoult, among others, are giving us a valuable critique of a serious problem with the way the Times—and, frankly, most of the so-called literary establishment—treats contemporary fiction. Which is to say: They ignore most of it, and when it comes to the narrow bandwidth of literature they do cover, their performance is underwhelming, “not only meager but shockingly mediocre,” as former LA Times Book Review director Steve Wasserman said three years ago. And it hasn’t gotten any better since then, leaving us with what Jennifer Weiner describes as “a disease that’s rotting the relationship between readers and reviewers.”
--at Strange Horizons, Anil Menon reviewsNarrative Power: Encounters, Celebrations, Struggles, ed by L. Timmel Duchamp. And a wonderfully crunchy review it is.
In this collection of essays, edited by L. Timmel Duchamp, narrative power is examined from sixteen different perspectives. The volume's subtitle—Encounters, Celebrations, Struggles—explains why its essays linger in the mind. Its writers have skin in the game. Many of their insights have that bittersweet flavor peculiar to autobiographical accounts. Some of the essays are reprints, but most originated from a Wiscon 2009 panel session. This might explain the informal, leaning-towards-the-microphone quality of the writing. All the essays are worth a second read and an individual response.
The federal government is warning residents in a small Wyoming town with extensive natural gas development not to drink their water, and to use fans and ventilation when showering or washing clothes in order to avoid the risk of an explosion.
The announcement accompanied results from a second round of testing and analysis in the town of Pavillion by Superfund investigators for the Environmental Protection Agency. Researchers found benzene, metals, naphthalene, phenols and methane in wells and in groundwater. They also confirmed the presence of other compounds that they had tentatively identified last summer and that may be linked to drilling activities.
((photo: Creative Commons/ Flickr user woodleywonderworks)
The water's loaded with carcinogens, of course-- and of course that's nothing new, since it's pretty commonplace for mineral extraction and drilling to wreck the local environment. (The gas company is in fact arguing that old mining pits are the sole source of the pollution, which could be true-- but could also simply be a lie.) But I've never before heard of people being warned that they could blow up in the shower... If I were a graphic artist (or had any ability to draw), I'd be really tempted to invent new icon for signifying danger of exploding while showering. People could put signs with them up in their bathrooms, to remind themselves to turn on the fan before turning on the water...
