Search for:

Pages

• About 1.0
• Call for Participants
• Communications 101: How to Argue Effectively & Respectfully
• Contributors
• Guidelines for Participation
• review copies
• Some sf book blogs
• what we’re using

feministsf.net

• FSF carnival
• FSF wiki

forums we like

• FeministSF forums
• i blame the patriarchy forum
• iris network forums

FSF blogs

• Ambling along the Aqueduct
• Antariksh Yatra
• Broad Universe
• BroadUniverse LJ
• Carl Brandon Society
• Carnival! of Feminist SF Fans
• Comic Fangirls’ LJ
• Designated Sidekick
• feminist fandom LJ
• Feminist Gamers
• FemSFBookswap
• FemSpec
• friends of lulu
• girl in the machine
• Girl Wonder
• Girls Read Comics (& they’re pissed)
• Guilded Lilies
• Jade Reporting
• Killer Betties
• League of Substitute Superheroes
• New Game Plus
• SF Bookswap
• She’s Such a Geek
• Still Life with Soup Can
• Take Back the Knight
• When Fangirls Attack
• whileaway
• WisCon LJ
• women & fantasy’s journal
• Written World

other stuff we read

• all girl army
• black sf society
• Carnival of Radical Feminists
• Carnival of the Feminists
• comic gays linkblog
• DeadBroWalking
• Deep Genre
• Endicott Studios Redux
• Feminism 101
• great hera
• Hathor Legacy
• Heroine Content
• Heroine Sheik
• i blame the patriarchy
• io9
• Megatrouble
• Nalo Hopkinson
• Occasional Superheroine
• official shrub
• people of colour SF carnival
• Tachyon Publications blog
• Token Minorities
• Women & Hollywood

projects

• Back Up Project LJ community

us, elsewhere

• And We Shall March
• Angry Black Woman
• Body Impolitic
• Brutal Women
• Central Cortex
• Composite
• derivative work
• FemSFBookswap
• Foul Papers
• Hiromi Goto
• New Game Plus
• SF Bookswap
• The Foul Papers Blog
• tychoish
• vito excalibur
• whileaway
• Words from the Center, Words from the Edge
• yonmei

Categories

• about this blog (14)
  • intros (3)
• activism (9)
• Art & Graphics (8)
• assorted (54)
• Awards & Recognition (28)
• Books & Literature (145)
• calls for papers (1)
• calls for submissions (1)
• Comics (13)
• Cons & Community (47)
• Criticism & Scholarship (23)
• Events (7)
• fandom (25)
• fanworks (4)
• female characters (86)
• feminism (43)
• feminist whimsy (10)
• FSF (18)
• FSF Activism (11)
• FSFnet projects (7)
• Gaming (7)
• geek sexism (21)
• gender in marketing (13)
• horror (3)
• Interview (1)
• lists (6)
• marketing & ads (1)
• music (1)
• News (21)
• obituaries (3)
• Online (35)
  • Linkblog (1)
  • sideshow (2)
• people of colour (29)
• politics (15)
• polls (4)
• Publishing (16)
• Race & Racism (21)
• science (11)
• Sexuality & queerness (25)
• slash (13)
• Theatre & Performance (2)
• Theory (11)
• transcripts (1)
• TV & Film (91)
• Utopia/Dystopia (2)
• vulgarisation (4)
• women in science (2)
• Women in Space (11)
• women writers (34)
• Writers & Artists (61)
• Young Adult (13)

72 Responses to “Late Business at the Hugo Awards”

1. Kevin Standlee on August 25, 2009 8:58 pm

   Thanks for the kind words about our conduct of the Introduction to WSFS and the Business Meeting. As you know, the procedural 16-ton weight that dropped on you is called “Objection to Consideration” — immediately after any item of original new business is proposed, the members may (and often do) vote without debate to kill it by a 2/3 vote. From a theoretical point of view this protects rights: A majority has rights too (most people tend to only think of rights as something that protect minorities), and in this case, a supermajority has the right to “not have its time wasted” by a proposal that is on its face hopeless. “Hopeless” in this case means “something that 2/3 of the people voting don’t even need to discuss to know it’s not going to pass.” Essentially, there is no unlmited right of debate before an assembly operating under parliamentary rules codified under Robert’s.

   But your idea of trying to change “Best” to “Most Popular” is extremely unlikely to work, either. The last time someone tried it, it also had an OTC dropped on it.

   It’s rarely profitable to show up out of the blue at a Business Meeting without having done considerable advance work persuading lots of key people — the “regulars” who turn up every year — to at least give you a chance to be heard. The rules allow it, but the Business Meetings of the past ten years or so have shown themselves to be highly reluctant to discuss business that hasn’t been kicked around in places they’ve seen it for at least a few months in advance.

   When I first started attending WSFS meetings in 1984, the agenda was longer and more complicated, with dozens of proposals. Nowadays there are far fewer proposals, because so many trial balloons have been shot down in advance of the meeting. I would not be surprised to see WSFS pass a rule in the next few years requiring new business to be submitted six weeks or so in advance (it’s currently less than 18 hours) and that the agenda be published on the convention’s web site at least a week or two before the con.

2. Yonmei on August 25, 2009 9:49 pm

   Thanks for the clarification re Roberts Rules of Order terminology: I briefly tried to remember it, considered finding the information sheet, decided the terminology was not relevant to the point of the story, and posted it anyway.

   But your idea of trying to change “Best” to “Most Popular” is extremely unlikely to work, either.

   Not my idea: a woman in the row behind me either at the preparatory or the preliminary business meeting mentioned it and I thought then that this would work just as well as a workaround… and already knew from the background she gave that it was just as unlikely to pass.

   It’s rarely profitable to show up out of the blue at a Business Meeting without having done considerable advance work persuading lots of key people — the “regulars” who turn up every year — to at least give you a chance to be heard.

   Yes, but I’m not “key people”: I don’t even know who the “key people” would be. I am very far from being a SMOF or a regular or the kind of fan who really has anything much to do with WSFS or the Hugos – I just read what SF/F I can afford to, go to cons and Worldcons when I can afford to go to them, splash around in blue fandom, and have done so for about 25 years and hope to do for another 50.

   And while the meeting scrubbed the amendment without discussion, I think I can say: it was heard. People don’t expend that much venom on what they can’t hear. Cheryl was more optimistic than I was that it would get to a committee on Saturday: my guess was that it would die on Friday, but that the conversations it started would last a lot longer. No, it was by no means unprofitable: it was interesting; it was provocative: it was fun: and you do chair a meeting extremely well.

   More and more the claim Women can’t write is being answered not by re-definitions or by evasions, or by appeals to models, or to truth, or even by direct confrontation and anger (except as a deliberate, public tactic). This newest response is even more disturbing:
   It’s a What? from a group of turned-away, preoccupied female backs.

3. Grant Watson on August 25, 2009 10:16 pm

   I really, really like this suggested amendment. I’ve never been to a Worldcon (first one next year!), and never voted in the Hugos, but I do follow the awards annually and I think this is a genuinely good idea for an amendment. If anything I’d suggest changing it just a little to allow for the reverse to happen – if a nomination pool is filled with female authors, then the highest-nominated male work gets popped on. Obviously this is unlikely to ever happen in the immediate future given the current overwhelming male bias, but I can see such a change possibly allowing the amendment to gain ground over some stick-in-the-mud male voters at a business meeting.

4. Kevin Standlee on August 26, 2009 12:38 am

   Grant:
   

   …allowing the amendment to gain ground over some stick-in-the-mud male voters at a business meeting.

   Perhaps I’m reading more into what you wrote than what you intended, but it sure seems to me that you are implying that the vote on whether to consider the proposal split along gender lines. It didn’t. It was overwhelmingly against consideration. I didn’t bother to count because it was clearly more than two-thirds, but anyone who thinks it was just The Patriarchy shouting down The Women wasn’t there and wasn’t paying attention. Indeed, I was taken by the fact that in the discussions off the floor, it seemed to be the women who were much more vehement in their opposition to the proposal.

   Anyone who wants to push this proposal again had better be able to answer the most common objections I heard raised:

   1. If more than five nominees appear on the final ballot and only one of them is a woman, there will be an automatic assumption that she’s only on there by the working of this rule. (Currently, the only way you can get more than five nominees on the ballot involves a tie for the final place on the ballot. I think there have been as many as seven nominees on the ballot a couple of times.) This runs contrary to the spirit of the rules in that we do not publish nomination details prior to the announcement of the final results, and therefore, we do not order the nominees in any way. Doing anything that gives away the nomination rankings might tend to bias voters.

   2. Existing women who have been nominated and won Hugo Awards have already complained that they would feel slighted if people thought they were being given places on the ballot just because they were women rather than because the voters preferred them. Answer what we might call the “Connie Willis” argument or you won’t be taken seriously.

   3. Two of the four written-fiction Hugo Awards went to women this year. It seems unlikely to me that the regular voters would take this as a sign that women are under-represented in the Hugo Awards.

   4. No matter what you do, this is likely to be labeled, “The Affirmative Action Amendment” and I expect that will carry negative connotations.

5. Kevin Standlee on August 26, 2009 12:41 am

   Yes, but I’m not “key people”: I don’t even know who the “key people” would be.

   Now you do. Cheryl can tell you.

   But changing the WSFS Constitution is hard. that’s not a bug; it’s a feature. Constitutions aren’t supposed to be easy to change, and the mechanism (affirmative votes at two consecutive Worldcons) is deliberately designed to make sure than any change has broad support, not just that one person was able to get fifty friends to storm a meeting. The voting-down of the Semiprozine amendment is a sign that the process works, in that there are many people who don’t regularly attend the BM but pay attention to the results and who will turn up at the ratification stage for any proposal about which they feel strongly.

6. Yonmei on August 26, 2009 4:20 am

   Grant: I was sitting in the front row of the meeting, and there was no diversity monitoring, so I do not know exactly how many women and how many men were present, but the majority to dismiss without consideration was visibly extremely large (it was done by a standing vote), so I’m sure Kevin’s correct to say it didn’t split along gender lines: I received criticism about it both from women and from men.

   Kevin: Now you do.

   Still not a Worldcon business meeting regular, and never will be – Worldcons mostly happen where I can’t possibly afford to go to them.

   But changing the WSFS Constitution is hard. that’s not a bug; it’s a feature.

   Absolutely: and I agree it should be.

   But getting an amendment to the WSFS Constitution wasn’t my goal. My goal on Wednesday was “What can I do about the lack of people nominating writing by women to win a Hugo award?” and while this amendment is one solution, other solutions are less concrete and have more to do with people thinking about who they’re nominating, and why: what they’re reading, and why; and being aware that, over the past 10 years, the statistical bias has been such that only in 13.3% of written categories has anything like equal numbers of women and men shortlisted. Some people may react to this information by asserting that this means men just are better writers than women: but I like to think that most fans are smarter than that.

   And hopefully, some of them, without simply coming to the conclusion that of course they’re not in any way biased: it just happened that this year they decided all the new SF they were going to buy/review/nominate was all by men… so it goes.

   Answer what we might call the “Connie Willis” argument or you won’t be taken seriously. …. It seems unlikely to me that the regular voters would take this as a sign that women are under-represented in the Hugo Awards.

   The statistical bias that keeps women writers from being short-listed is such that when a woman writer does get short-listed she’s so much better than any of the men she gets more votes. Nominations, just from the list and from my own knowledge of how the Hugos work, can be made only by the small pool of people who both read SF the year it’s published and are voting members of the WSFS. I would be interested to know exactly how small that pool is, because reading down the list of names shortlisted, it struck me how little variety there seemed to be – though I haven’t (as I have with the gender imbalance) actually examined this as data.

   We’ve discussed on this blog before how women tend to have less disposable income than men and are therefore less able to be able to nominate written works for a Hugo: if you can’t afford to buy new books except when they come out in paperback, you almost never read them in their eligible period for nomination.

7. Cheryl Morgan on August 26, 2009 6:32 am

   Details of the exact numbers of people participating in the Hugo Awards voting are available in the voting summaries for each year. Those for 2009 are linked to at the bottom of this post. I have a pile of historical data too, but no time right now to analyze it.

   The numbers are very small, particularly when compared to the number of people actually eligible to vote. Various initiatives are in place to encourage participation, including John Scalzi’s voter package. And Kevin and I occasionally make radical suggestions that outrage SMOFdom such as this one.

   Ultimately, however, the Hugos are going to reflect popular demographics. Even if 10,000 people voted, roughly 5,000 of them would be male and a good proportion of those would be people who don’t read fiction by women unless they are provided with a strong incentive to do so. Indeed, I suspect that wider participation might even make it less likely that women would win.

8. Yonmei on August 26, 2009 7:11 am

   With regard to participation, I did find a certain irony in your comment on the thread here that “Indeed, whenever a name from outside the community appears on the ballot someone always raises the suspicion that a ballot stuffing operation has taken place.” – because how could someone be nominated who isn’t One Of Us unless shady practice has happened?

   A broader spectrum of people voting might change the “Hugos as club awards” pattern, where the people nominated remain pretty much the same from year to year – I noticed in particular over 10 years that though I know many, many excellent fan writers publishing, the pool of people who can be shortlisted as Best Fan Writer is evidently really very small…

   But as you note: the issue of small number of voters is not identical to the issue of masculist bias.

   (Also, I perceive from the thread that WSFS-fandom is still not over Jacqueline Lichtenberg having enough fans vote for her as Best Fan Writer to get a Hugo nomination… which does amuse me a tad.)

9. Cheryl Morgan on August 26, 2009 7:32 am

   the pool of people who can be shortlisted as Best Fan Writer is evidently really very small…

   Believe me, I am painfully aware of this fact.

   Again we do try, but this panel was very poorly attended in Montreal. Hopefully the online version is getting more attention.

   The list of things that various segments of fandom is very long, but the Lichtenberg thing is pretty much ancient history by now. There was a time when Ben Yalow was seen as one of those awful young Star Trek fans. Nowadays they are much more concerned with Scientologists, Scalzi, and in some cases me.

10. Yonmei on August 26, 2009 8:06 am

    Believe me, I am painfully aware of this fact.

    Sorry. I realised after posting that it could be interpreted as a personal dig, and such was not my intention.

    Again we do try, but this panel was very poorly attended in Montreal.

    I can’t even remember when it was on: the names of panellists told me that this was not meant to be a panel to discuss any of the fan writers I think are the best: Afrai, Torch, Daegaer – Lucy Gillam, whose essay about male privilege in fandom I’ve already linked to a couple of times from this blog – and others. There are a lot of good fan writers writing and publishing. And in principle, they’re as eligible for nomination as the Dave Langfords of this world. But in practice, were they to get enough nominations to be short-listed, it would be Jacqueline Lichtenberg all over again.

11. Jim C. Hines » Hugo Awards: Shaped that way for a reason on August 26, 2009 9:40 am

    [...] came across a post by Yonmei, talking about why she proposed the amendment.  Two of the points she [...]

12. Cheryl Morgan on August 26, 2009 9:57 am

    I didn’t take it as a personal dig from you, but I can assure you I have had my fill of, “you only won because…” comments. Some of them are, of course, justified, although the same is often true of the other nominees.

    The panel was specifically designed to feature this year’s Fan Writer nominees, which inevitably skewed what we would talk about. That’s one reason I went for a very diverse mix of recommendations, but I don’t read everyone, not by a very long way.

    Don’t be quite so quick to assume prejudice as regards to new fan writers. Sure people would be suspicious, and to a certain extent they are right to be. However, WSFS is not a homogeneous lump. Tim and Kevin were very happy to help you, despite being male UberSMOFs. Fandom is much bigger and more diverse than it was in Lichtenberg’s day, and a lot of people recognize that. Those who don’t have largely turned their back on Worldcon, and instead hide in the dark corners of the Trufen mailing list muttering about how awful it is that someone like me can win a Fan Hugo.

13. Yonmei on August 26, 2009 10:07 am

    I didn’t take it as a personal dig from you, but I can assure you I have had my fill of, “you only won because…” comments.

    Meh. People are asses. You are absolutely a damn fine writer.

    Don’t be quite so quick to assume prejudice as regards to new fan writers.

    Afrai, Torch, Daegaer, and Lucy Gillam are none of them new fan writers. All of them have been steadily writing and producing new fan works over the past ten years and even further. All of them, however, write and are known in media fandom – which certainly attends the Worldcon, but which isn’t considered to be part of “fandom” by many people who think of their part of fandom as the only part there is. (I referred to it as “WSFS fandom” as a convenient handle.)

    Tim and Kevin were very happy to help you, despite being male UberSMOFs.

    Tim and Kevin were ace!

    Those who don’t have largely turned their back on Worldcon, and instead hide in the dark corners of the Trufen mailing list muttering about how awful it is that someone like me can win a Fan Hugo.

    At the WSFS business meeting I attended, one of the speakers noted that of course they don’t want media fans coming to the Worldcon, because we don’t read books. (In the polite atmosphere of the business meeting, it was of course impossible to tell how many people took that as just an accurate assessment and how many people thought “What is he on?” but it’s clearly still a sentiment felt by at least some people active in the Worldcon.)

14. Cheryl Morgan on August 26, 2009 10:34 am

    By “new” I meant new to the Hugo ballot, not new to writing.

    You will certainly still find a few people at Worldcon who are hard-core anti-media, but they are a minority that we can generally beat where necessary, for example with the Dramatic Presentation split, or the Graphic Story Hugo, neither of which would have happened if the anti-media people had got their way.

    Just as an example, look at a few former Worldcon chairs. Rene Walling: anime fan; Hiroko Inoue; big name anime director; Colin Harris; Joss Whedon fan; Kevin Standlee; anime fan; Craig Miller; works in Hollywood.

    As I said, the real hard core conservatives have turned their back on Worldcon as they think it is hopelessly corrupted.

15. Kevin Standlee on August 26, 2009 11:01 am

    What Cheryl said, again. In fact, it’s amusing in a sad way to see the hard-core ‘traditional’ fan say that “Worldcon has become a hopeless media con and has lost all touch with what Real Science Fiction Conventions do,” while others look at it and say, “Worldcon is a snooty literary-professional conference and can’t possibly claim to be a ‘general’ SF convention because it doesn’t have any movie or TV stars, like Real Science Fiction Conventions do.”

    Some of the post-con reviews of Anticipation have included a variation on a theme I’ve heard many times before: “Too much programming! You should have fewer, larger program items so that the attendees have more of a ‘shared experience.’” I’ve concluded that what this really means to most people who say this is, “Get rid of all of the programming I personally dislike and concentrate on my areas of interest.” Not that many people would admit to this, I think, not even to themselves.

16. steve davidson on August 26, 2009 12:54 pm

    Thanks for putting up the history of this amendment.

    I understand both your reasons for proposing it, and the at least some of the reasons it was not adopted.

    Like most, I want the Hugo’s to be awarded for the reasons given in the definition of the award. I would also like to believe that it is awarded in a fair, open and egalitarian environment.

    One of the things I’ve been doing of late is entering SF/F/H award and nominee data into a small database so that I can quickly look up bits of information when subjects like this one (or the ‘Hugos and its voters suck kerfuffle) to see if there is any factual and/or statistical knowledge that can be gained from the raw data.

    Regarding the Hugos (and here I am speaking of the Best Novel category only): the first female author to be nominated was Marion Zimmer Bradley in 1963, followed by Andre Norton in 1964. No female author won or was nominated again until 1970 when Ursual LeGuin would win the award.

    My attention was drawn to the era that started that year. It begins (slowly) an era in which female authors are increasingly nominated for and/or win Hugos for best novel.

    Two female nominees in 72, 1 female winner in 75, a winner in 77, a nominee in 78, three nominees and a winner in 79, 1 nominee in 80, a winner 81, a winner and a nominee in 82, a nominee in 83, 84, 86, 89.

    I don’t suggest that the above means “everything is all right”, nor do I know how to make any assessment of what percentage of male to female nominees/winners constitutes “fairness” (we’d at least have to start with solid numbers for number of works published each year, breakdown of gender amongst those and then we still run into the ‘quality’ determination issue),

    but I will suggest that someone who really wants to delve into this issue could probably find some interesting information by looking more closely at what was going on in the field during the era listed, particularly 1977 through 1985.

    If the dynamics at work back then can be discerned, it would probably provide at least a small bit of insight into addressing these issues in the current era.

17. steve davidson on August 26, 2009 1:00 pm

    Forgot to add: Nebulas seem to have a more even mix of gender beginning in the 90s.

    I’m also now wondering what would be revealed if we were to add other descriptors to the nominees – how would that break things down – nationality, race, creed, sexual orientation, etc. Things would still be male dominated, though I suspect that there would be lack of representation of other descriptors (certainly race if not others).

18. Yonmei on August 26, 2009 6:22 pm

    My attention was drawn to the era that started that year. It begins (slowly) an era in which female authors are increasingly nominated for and/or win Hugos for best novel.

    Two female nominees in 72, 1 female winner in 75, a winner in 77, a nominee in 78, three nominees and a winner in 79, 1 nominee in 80, a winner 81, a winner and a nominee in 82, a nominee in 83, 84, 86, 89.

    Yes: you might find An Open Letter To Joanna Russ by Jeanne Gomol illuminating with regard to what was happening to fandom in the 1970s – and how the backlash hit fandom in the 1980s.

    Fandom is not immune to the movements of the time. The rise of the women’s liberation movement affected both science-fiction and SF/F fandom: as did, I believe the Hugos record, the backlash against feminism.

19. Link roundup, 2nd Impact (August 27th, 2009) | Geek Feminism Blog on August 26, 2009 9:39 pm

    [...] Late business at the Hugo Awards in which Yonmei proposes a small modification to the nomination procedures for the Hugos to help redress the gender imbalance. Result: “There was certainly considerable SMOFFISH outrage at the idea that there could be anything imperfect or biased about the Hugo nomination system which might need to be remedied.” Links to LJ discussions at the bottom of the post. [...]

20. Yonmei on August 27, 2009 5:19 am

    Kevin: What Cheryl said, again.

    Clearly, though we all three heard the comment at the WSFA Preliminary Business meeting that “media fans don’t read books and we don’t want them at the Worldcon”, we all three heard it from a different perspective, and it’s rather a sideline to the discussion about gender imbalance at the Hugo awards.

21. Yonmei on August 27, 2009 5:21 am

    Cheryl: By “new” I meant new to the Hugo ballot, not new to writing.

    But why should someone only be able to win a “Best Fan Writer” award if they’ve spent years being nominated, short-listed, and failing to win? If “Best Fan Writer” is meant to reward excellence, it shouldn’t require long-term service on the short-lists first….

22. Cheryl Morgan on August 27, 2009 5:31 am

    Yonmei:

    The Hugos are a popular vote award. It is certainly possible for someone to be so good that they take the fannish world by storm (Susanna Clarke, for example), but most people take time to build up popularity. Also everyone’s idea of excellence is different.

23. Yonmei on August 27, 2009 5:52 am

    but most people take time to build up popularity.

    True. But, the fan writers I named and many others have already built up popularity – the newest of those I named has been writing for about 7 or 8 years. You seemed to be equating “built up popularity” with “appears on Hugo shortlist”.

24. Cheryl Morgan on August 27, 2009 6:17 am

    Well you have to build up popularity with the people who vote, or persuade the people with whom you are popular to vote. It is a process, involving lots of human beings. Ideas like “best”, “excellence” and “the right result” are not Platonic Ideals to which the Hugos can aspire, they are just a form of popular consensus.

25. Beating Ourselves Up, No Big O For All the Effort | The Crotchety Old Fan on August 27, 2009 7:48 am

    [...] – Here.  Action – Here – commentary [...]

26. Yonmei on August 27, 2009 8:32 am

    Well you have to build up popularity with the people who vote, or persuade the people with whom you are popular to vote. It is a process, involving lots of human beings.

    I understand that, but my first reaction to it was “but why would that take years?” until I thought: of course it would, because it wouldn’t make use of the Internet but oldstyle cons-only campaigning: you can only nominate someone to be Best Fanwriter if you are already an WSFS member at nominations time, and as we saw during RaceFail, media fandom makes use of the Internet more creatively and more flexibly than oldstyle “WSFS fandom” does. Assuming Torch wanted to be up for a Hugo (for example) I could nominate her, and if it were possible to buy “Hugo voting memberships” for $25 it would be be perfectly feasible to begin an online campaign to get people to register for a voting membership, encourage them to nominate/vote in other categories, but campaign for them to nominate/vote for Torch in Best Fanwriter category. I don’t know if it would work to get Torch shortlisted, but she’s an excellent writer who has given many people much pleasure over the years, besides being a delightful person in herself. If Hugo voting membership were priced at something affordable, people who had a general interest in SF/F as well as liking Torch well might – it would be a year’s campaign, for nominations and votes, but it would be perfectly doable.

    …which is one reason why I think WSFS/SMOFdom will continue to look askance on the idea that people from outside the exclusive club of “regular Worldcon attenders” should be allowed to buy Hugo voting membership: the shortlists would look different from year to year, if people could use the Internet to campaign for themselves or for a favourite writer’s nomination.

    Though Dave Langford would probably continue to lead Best Fanwriter unless he started feeling his collection of Hugos was really too large to keep dusted and used Ansible to tell people not to vote for him. ;-)

27. Cheryl Morgan on August 27, 2009 9:25 am

    Interesting that you see $25 as a viable level for campaigning. When I’ve talked about this before I have proposed $20 and been told that’s way too high. Maybe Feminists have more commitment.

    Of course if media fans decided to campaign there’s no guarantee that other groups would not do so as well. You might find yourselves out-voted by blockbuster fantasy fans, or Twilight fans.

28. Yonmei on August 27, 2009 9:36 am

    $25 is about £15 at current exchange rates, which is roughly what I’d pay for a good fanzine or a decent t-shirt – or a couple of paperbacks. It’s not something I’d just hand over without thinking about, but it’s at a price level I think of as “affordable luxury” – worth paying for something nice. It’s partly my income is higher/more regular these days – there have been plenty of times in my life when £15 was a week’s food. I don’t think there’s any price level you could set a “Hugo voting membership” at which wouldn’t exclude some people who can’t afford that, but I recognise that the cheaper it is, the more likely you move into one person buying themselves multiple nominations from friends. “Cost of two paperbacks” seems about the right level to me.

29. File 770 » Blog Archive » The Joanna Russ Amendment on August 27, 2009 6:23 pm

    [...] wrote a blog post about the less-than-warm reception her idea received in Montreal. She must have felt its moral force counted for more than the spirit in which it was [...]

30. Yonmei on August 27, 2009 6:56 pm

    Writers who would have been added had the amendment passed in 1998 and been ratified in 1999: Eleanor Arnason, Kage Baker, Judith Berman, Claire Brialey, Lois McMaster Bujold, Nancy Kress (three times), Ellen Klages, Margo Lanagan, Evelyn Leeper, Ursula K. LeGuin, Elizabeth Malarette, Maureen McHugh, Vonda N. McIntyre, Cheryl Morgan, M. Ricker, J. K. Rowling (twice), and Jo Walton. File770 looked them up – for which much thanks. I’ve updated my list accordingly.

31. Gary Farber on August 27, 2009 10:21 pm

    There are an awful lot of possible issues to address here, but one point that you’ll inevitably find troublesome is that there’s always been a strong prejudice within the community that votes on the Hugos against any sort of Hugo campaigning, period. Regardless of the category, person, or reason.

    The reason for that prejudice, which has come up whenever someone new to Worldcons and their customs has thought a campaign was a good idea, for however good or bad a reason, is that campaigning would turn the Hugos into a set of campaigns for each award and possible nominee, and either everyone who wanted or thought they deserved a Hugo would have to counter-campaign, or simply disarm, and the whole thing would turn very ugly and utterly messy, and all end in tears.

    So whenever anyone, for any reason, suggests any kind of organized campaign to get someone a Hugo, historically, it’s tended to provoke a strong counter-reaction.

    This hasn’t, of course, prevented all such campaigns, as there are always new people coming along unfamiliar with the customs and reasons behind them, but it’s something to be aware of, and essentially I’m elaborating on a point Cheryl barely alluded to.

    It’s also exactly what happened with Jacqueline Lichtenberg, incidentally. It’s certainly accurate to say that some people didn’t like her nomination because historically fiction-writing hadn’t been what the Fan Writer Hugo had historically been for, but on that point, everyone who chooses to vote is perfectly entitled to their own opinion. But the fact that a bunch of people started a campaign to win someone a Fan Writer Hugo, period, was the primary cause of the counter-reaction. There simply was no precedent for anyone even trying to organize a campaign to get someone a Best Fan Writer Hugo prior to that. It’s one of those things that Just Wasn’t Done.

    There was no lack of history of someone from “media fandom” being nominated, though; Ruth Berman was nominated in the second year the Best Fan Writer category existed, 1968, and what she was nominated for was overwhelmingly her writing on Star Trek, primarily in the first Star Trek fanzines.

    Beyond that note, gosh, there’s a lot here one could tackle. Please forgive me if I leave it at that single (or double) note, at least for now. I do otherwise feel you have some valid concerns, and sympathize with your feelings.

    I think raising the issues you did with your proposed amendment was an entirely valid and appropriate thing to do, but, indeed, anyone trying to make any changes in the WSFS Constitution generally has to expect to lobby for several years to have much chance of success, simply because any change has to be voted on and passed two successive years in a row, and there’s also no one online location you can address all the potential voters at a Business Meeting, which, of course, is open to all Worldcon attendees, but, which, of course, is also something most people can’t afford to attend every year.

    So, yes, there’s inevitably a great deal of frustration apt to be involved in seeking to make any changes with such a (deliberately) cumbersome mechanism.

    But all the Hugos are, ultimately, are a popularity contest amongst a, as you note, relatively small number of people. They don’t, and can’t, as no award can, reflect any form of objective criteria, including “excellence.” They’re just a bunch of collected opinions.

32. Gary Farber on August 27, 2009 10:34 pm

    Having said that, of course, it’s hard to resist addressing other issues. For instance: “Voting for the Hugos is formally restricted to a fairly limited group of people – you must have bought your voting membership before the voting deadline passes, some weeks before the date of the Worldcon itself,”

    That gives everyone at least three years warning, actually; four, if you decide to buy supporting memberships and vote regular, and indefinitely, if you decide you wish to keep doing it.

    (During the period that Worldcons were voted upon three years in advance, that meant you actually had six years to get around to choosing to vote before the voting deadline passed.)

    This is not actually a terribly restrictive amount of time, or advance warning.

    “The cheapest place and time to buy a Worldcon membership is generally at the Worldcon two years earlier, after the winning site is decided on.”

    Actually, you can go cheaper by buying a supporting membership in the Worldcon bid, however many number of years it might be in existence before the vote to choose where the Worldcon will be two years later, and get a further discount, though, of course, you might have to buy a supporting membership in more than one bid when there’s competition. Again, this is intended to be a feature, not a bug, so as to encourage people to join in the community.

    “…the idea that there could be anything imperfect or biased about the Hugo nomination system which might need to be remedied…”

    Er, people have been arguing about the imperfections and biases of the Hugo, heatedly, since 1956, when they were institutionalized. There’s never been a year since when a number of people weren’t heatedly arguing over one problem or another they felt passionately about.

    “I noticed in particular over 10 years that though I know many, many excellent fan writers publishing, the pool of people who can be shortlisted as Best Fan Writer is evidently really very small…”

    It’s tautological: for better or worse, if you want to win a Hugo, you have to make yourself known to the people who vote for them.

    Needless to say, this has always been a point that fans have argued about the merits and demerits of, since Ted White created the Fan Writer and Fan Artist categories in 1967, as chair of the Worldcon that year, Nycon III, and the environment has evolved considerably in recent years with the rise of the internet, among other factors.

33. Gary Farber on August 27, 2009 10:51 pm

    Oh, and one more darn point, regarding Jacqueline Lichtenberg, is that the year she was nominated, 1974, the full set of nominees for Best Fan Writer were:
    Susan Wood Glicksohn, later just “Susan Wood,” who won, and:
    * Laura Basta
    * Richard E. Geis
    * Jacqueline Lichtenberg
    * Sandra Miesel

    Setting aside that four out of five nominees were women, two points:
    1) Laura Basta was also nominated for her Star Trek fanzine writing about Star Trek;
    2) Susan Wood, who won, was the most activist sf fan in advocating feminist perspectives on fandom, before any other woman in sf fandom was raising consciousness about femimist issues. I could run through a long set of Susan’s credentials as a fan and feminist, including being the originator of the “Room of Our Own” “safe place” for women at Worldcons a couple of years later, organizing the first feminist-oriented programing at Worldcon at MidAmeriCon in 1976, being one of the founders of “A Woman’s Apa,” authored the first serious critique of sexism in comics, The Poison Maiden and the Great Bitch: Female Stereotypes in Marvel Superhero Comics, and who went on to continue to be a major activist in feminist sf fan circles, and as an academic professor/writer on feminism and science fiction, before her untimely, if not outright tragic, death in 1980. She also won the Hugo for Best Fan Writer in 1977, and 1981, as well as co-winning the 1973 Hugo for Best Fanzine, and being co-Fan GOH at the Worldcon in 1975. (And helping to inspire the creation of Wiscon, as well as Amanda Bankier’s feminist sf fanzine, The Witch And The Chameleon, and Jeanne Gomoll’s and Jan Bogstad’s Janus, which was equally or more importance in the history of feminism in sf fandom.

    I’d hate to think that feminist sf fans of today are unaware of Susan’s history and importance in sf fandom.

    (I wish your blog allowed for preview of comments, to make sure I haven’t left an open tag, or made some other careless proofreading error.)

34. Gary Farber on August 27, 2009 11:00 pm

    Susan was also nominated for Best Fan Writer in 1972, 1973, 1975, 1976, and 1978, as well as being the winner in 1974, a tied winner in 1977, and winner in 1981, I should also add.

    She was also a good friend of mine, incidentally.

35. Gary Farber on August 27, 2009 11:10 pm

    Kevin: “Some of the post-con reviews of Anticipation have included a variation on a theme I’ve heard many times before: ‘Too much programming! You should have fewer, larger program items so that the attendees have more of a ’shared experience.’’”

    Kevin, people have been saying this ever since Worldcon expanded from a single track of programming, before your time or mine.

    But it really jumped up with the explosion in programming tracks at Discon II, in 1974, for the record, even though they retained several very large events that most attendees crowded in for.

    But there were certainly complaints about this by the time of the TASFiC, the 1952 Worldcon better known informally as “Chicon II.”

36. Madeline F on August 28, 2009 12:50 am

    I don’t get this emphasis on the late 70s/early 80s. People who were born then have grown up, married, had kids, and died in between then and now. I just did a bit of calculating, and it looks like more than 40,000 people in the 25-34 age group in the USA die every year… Are there even 40,000 people living who have ever been to a Worldcon?

    The claim that people could get cheaper voting memberships by gambling on where the Worldcon will be in three years is hooey. Look at 2012. A google turns up worldcon.org/bids. Chicago is really the only option? Well, that seems like a decent gamble… They’ve got some kind of baffling escrow thing which puts further doubt on the ability to get a supporting membership… And, wait, they only take money in person, which would require coughing up $90 for a one-day pass to Anticipation… If you were already in Montreal. And had a time machine.

    It’s a common complaint that SF convention fans largely don’t care about voting for the Hugos. People who do care about voting for the Hugos, but who aren’t SF convention fans, are pretty much hosed. $50 is BS to be a part of a careless club.

37. Kevin Standlee on August 28, 2009 12:57 am

    $50 is BS to be a part of a careless club.

    While I happen to think that the $50 supporting membership is too high, I want to point out that “careless” isn’t the right word here. “Very independent” is. Every single Worldcon is a completely independent, autonomous organization, and just about every attempt to make it less that way has been met with immediate protests and cries of “Stop WSFS Inc.!”

    WSFS has a government the same way the USA did from the Declaration of Independence until the ratification of the current Constitution. That is, it was a group of mutually-suspicious, highly-fractious, jealous-of-their-autonomy states that grudgingly cooperated on a small number of things that they admitted they couldn’t do individually. But they didn’t like it, and they kept the central government virtually powerless as a result.

    A consequence of this form of governance is that even things that seem obviously out of whack like the current price of a supporting membership are very difficult to fix because the actual change involves undoing a different piece of the complicated constitutional procedures for which getting cooperation is so difficult.

    Mind you, to some people — and you’ll see this if a serious proposal ever makes it to the floor — like the current system and believe it would significantly devalue the worth of the Hugo Awards if you could vote for only $20 or so.

38. Yonmei on August 28, 2009 2:30 am

    Madelaine: I don’t get this emphasis on the late 70s/early 80s. People who were born then have grown up, married, had kids, and died in between then and now.

    Because if you are trying to make a claim that the Hugo nomination process is not sexist and therefore does not need to be fixed, you need to cherry-pick your data quite, quite carefully. One way to do that is to keep arguing that if Connie Willis can win 15 Hugos plainly it’s not sexist: another way (and Gary Farber is not the first man fan I’ve seen to try this strategy) is to focus on a short era about 30+ years ago.

    And, wait, they only take money in person, which would require coughing up $90 for a one-day pass to Anticipation…

    Well, as another dock worker (the only other woman to work both full days Wednesday and Monday) pointed out to me – she’s from the US – if you live in the US and plan your vacation time around Worldcons, Worldcon membership is the cheapest part: you vote for all the plausible locations and you buy a membership at the con two years earlier. The occasional Worldcons that take place outside the US, you ask a richer friend who’s going to buy you your cheap con membership at the con. WSFS is structured to discourage outsiders from getting in, certainly in North America, but to keep regulars able to keep right on going.

    That this strategy inevitably leads to the famous “graying of fandom” worry, is not something I imagine WSFS will ever manage to do anything about.

    Kevin: Mind you, to some people — and you’ll see this if a serious proposal ever makes it to the floor — like the current system and believe it would significantly devalue the worth of the Hugo Awards if you could vote for only $20 or so.

    I’m sure you’re right. And were this to be tried out for a few years, I’m fairly sure also that the fact that it would certainly – if taken up with any widespread enthusiasm – introduce changes to the shortlists, which would itself be regarded as evidence that the change had made the Hugos less valuable. You’ve noted several times that “majorities have rights” – but the majority of SF/F fans in this instance have no vote to change it, and no real means of ever getting a vote to change it. In effect, this argument is “Worldcon fans are slans”.

39. Yonmei on August 28, 2009 2:34 am

    Gary; It’s tautological: for better or worse, if you want to win a Hugo, you have to make yourself known to the people who vote for them.

    While carefully avoiding any appearance of “campaigning” to be nominated.

    This WSFS-fannish snobbism “The right kind of people don’t campaign: we simply Know Who They Are” does go far to explain why the pool of people eligible to be Best Fan Writers is so small – most fan writers, no matter how excellent they are as writers, are simply not people who will become known to the pool of people who will nominate. It makes sense if the point is to be sure you don’t accidentally end up awarding a Hugo to someone who is not The Right Kind of People, merely because enough Worldcon attendees have heard of her that, once shortlisted, they’ll vote for her…

40. Paul Chafe on August 28, 2009 6:46 am

    Yonmei asks at the beginning of this that someone check the stats for the number of books actually published by male and female authors respectively. I’ve looked into this, and this is what I’ve found.

    I will start with the caveat that any methodology on something so subjective as “science fiction” is going to be subject to some dispute. It is impossible (for me at least) to adequately survey all the various kinds of science fiction that might concievably be Hugo eligible, let alone count the number of books by all the possible male and female writers published in the course of a year. The best I could hope for was a neutral sampling technique

    My first thought was to use the Amazon top 100 SF titles list, but Amazon includes vampire novels, horror novels and Harry Potter in it’s science fiction category. I don’t think these count as science fiction, but I didn’t want to subjectively include or exclude books based on my own opinion of how well they fit. I searched a few other lists, but none I found were machine-assembled. Any human compiled list of books is subject to the biases of the person who put it together, and could not be assumed to be sex-neutral.

    Ultimately I gave up on counting books and decided to count authors instead. This allowed me to use the Gnod engine literature map. (www.literature-map.com). Gnod assembles a list of authors who are similar to other authors, based on the tastes of readers who have entered their favourites. It works by assuming that if a person likes authors A and B then A and B similar in some fashion, and then it assembles networks of similar authors that you can browse to maybe discover someone you’d like to read, based on who you already like to read.

    The wonderful thing about gnod is that it isn’t subject to popularity bias (ie, if 1000 of the 10000 people who’ve chosen Ray Bradbury also choose Ursala K Leguin and 10 people of the 100 people who’ve chosen Someone Obscure also choose Ursala K Leguin then the linkage between Le Guin and Bradbury and Le Guin and Obscure will have the same strength. In short Gnod finds similarities, not popularities.

    For our purposes this eliminates any self-selection bias that might exist due to a larger number of one sex or the other choosing to read science fiction, or choosing to enter their preferences into Gnod. This should give us a good approximation of the relative ratio of male and female writers in the field.

    Biases

    1) There remains another bias towards popularity, since Gnod only displays at most the top fifty names in a similarity cloud, but this can be expected to give something approaching the top 100 names in a genre within ten searches, conservatively assuming an average of five shared results per writer. This is enough to be statistically significant.

    2) Writers of the same sex might be expected to cluster closer together than writers of the opposite sex, which might lead to entire groups being overlooked over successive searches. To eliminate this bias I used five prominent female writers and five prominent male writers as search seeds.

    3) The Gnod database contains duplications (eg; Ursala K Leguin has at least 5 variations of her name in there). I corrected for these errors when I caught them, but can’t guarantee that I caught them all.

    4) Sometimes I couldn’t know from the name if a writer was male or female. These names were not included.

    5) Gnod produces a fairly random scatter of results on the screen which is a little hard to count, so there may be some counting errors

    6) Because Gnod doesn’t know about genre but only clusters by judged similarity, some non-SF writers showed up in the mix. I did not correct for this, since it would have introduced my own subjective bias into the process. And after all, most of Dr. Suess’s creations could be considered aliens, and Frank Zappa probably is one. ;)

    7) I chose writers names because they seemed prominent to me as I tried to think of prominent writers. This represents a personal bias. A more random approach would be better.

    With possible errors documented, here’s the list of seed writers I used, with the number of Gnod-identified similar women and similar men listed beside them, and the overall totals and percentages.

    Similar Similar
    Name Female Male Total % Female
    Ursala K Leguin 7 34 41 17.07%
    Elizabeth Moon 17 28 45 37.78%
    Nancy Kress 7 27 34 20.59%
    Connie Willis 22 25 47 46.81%
    Mercedes Lackey 20 23 43 46.51%

    Ray Bradbury 5 45 50 10.00%
    Philip K Dick 3 37 40 7.50%
    Kim S Robinson 7 40 47 14.89%
    Spider Robinson 10 35 45 22.22%
    Greg Bear 7 39 46 15.22%

    Totals 105 333 438 23.97%

    I then got a list of all the female Hugo nominees from ’98 to ’07, courtesy http://www.kith.org/journals/jed/2007/03/31/3864.html

    I’m assuming Jed’s done his homework and there are no errors here. He lists the Big 4 categories. I added in the column for the sex of the winner for the novel category only.

    Year Women Total Percent Winner (Novel)
    1998 1 21 5% M
    1999 6 23 26% F
    2000 5 21 24% M
    2001 5 21 24% F
    2002 4 21 19% M
    2003 3 21 14% M
    2004 4 21 19% F
    2005 3 20 15% F
    2006 3 20 15% M
    2007 1 20 5% M

    Total: 35 209 17% 40%

    Finally, to approximate the ratio of male Hugo voters to female Hugo voters, I counted up the names on the Anticipation member list whose last name started with A (the A-list, heh). Neglecting ambiguous names, This gave me 35 female and 54 male names, or about 39% female. There are 1.5x as many male fans as female fans in this sample. A sample of 89 is reasonably statistically significant. However any counting errors I have made are worth better than a percentage point. If someone wants to do the whole membership list, this would be a good thing.

    We can now start doing some math. I will round to the nearest percentage point. All numbers (obviously) apply to these samples only.

    1) 24% of writers are female and 76% are male.

    2) 17% of Hugo nominees are female and 83% are male (Big 4).

    3) 40% of Hugo (novel) winners are female.

    4) 39% of fans are female and 61% are male.

    5) Reader preference clusters with writer gender by 10%. Thus female writers are grouped with other females 34% of the time rather than the 24% that random chance would give. Conversely male writers are found with other males 86% of the time, rather than the expected 76%. (Average the averages in the %female of the Gnod table to get these numbers)

    We can now put out some hypothesis.

    Hypothesis 0) Hugo voters vote without regard for the gender of the writer. In this case we would expect to see 24% of Hugo nominees as women, and 86% as men. We actually see 17%, but this doesn’t automatically mean that there is a bias. In fact the 99% confidence interval for this statistic is 7.61%, which means that if the expected nomination rate of women is 24%, the result we actually see will fall between 16% and 31%, 99% of the time. 17% is in there, though just barely. We could statistically accept the null hypothesis based on this, but this is a pretty wide confidence interval, and I think we can do better.

    Hypothesis 1) Hugo voters vote their chromosomes as a matter of principle and have no other preference. In this case the average nominee gets a weighted result %-of-samesex-voters/%-of-nominees

    Women .39/.17 = 2.29
    Men .61/.83 = .73

    Which is to say the under these conditions the average female would get nominated 3:1 over the average male. This paradoxical result is because the male vote is split among the many male candidates, while the female vote is concentrated on a few.

    This isn’t what happens, so clearly Hugo voters aren’t voting a straight ticket based on their DNA. We need a better model (and a more charitable view of humanity).

    Hypothesis 2) Hugo voters prefer writers of their own sex, and most prefer writers who more strongly cater to their chromosome-based preferences.

    This concept has some plausibiity, because there are definitely writing styles and markets that cater almost exclusively to one sex. If we imagine an award for a bizarre bi-genre that combined harlequin romances with cheap secret agent novels we could expect this kind of outcome. The result will depend on the exact vote distribution within each sub-group. I won’t bother with that, to a first approximation the majority will rule. In the case of science fiction, the 39/61 female/male ratio means we would expect only males on the ballot, with a very few exceptions.

    This also isn’t what we see either, so we need to model further. On a purely personal level I’d like to think that SF, as a field, plays to something higher than the lowest-common-denominator.

    Hypothesis 3) Men conspire and women are naive.

    I hesitate to put it up because its pretty insulting to both sexes. However this is the patriarchy argument and it needs to be addressed. There’s no question that absolutely blatant discrimination was the norm in living memory, and to say there’s no sexism in SF is pretty naive as well. We have look to see what effect this could have.

    In this case, men vote for men exclusively, and women spread their votes around. This devolves to majority rule as in case 2. Women would be almost entirely absent on the ballot. Again actual numbers depend on details of vote distribution, but given the male-majority voter demographic and you are looking at effectively zero. We don’t see this.

    Hypothesis 4) Voter preferences follow the clustering preferences seen on Gnod without regard to either voter sex or writer sex. Which is to say, voters prefer either the male or female writing styles (as defined by Gnod clustering, not any value judgement of mine) rather than male or female writers per se, and vote their honest preference.

    In this case we should see the proportional representation of male/female writers, skewed by the 10% skew we discovered in finding 5) above. This gives us 16% female and 84% male Hugo nominees. This is almost exactly what we see. So what have we learned?

    1) We can definitively rule out the two scenarios where men and women hardline vote for same-sex writers, because they give such extreme results. Ditto for the patriarchy scenario.

    2) We can’t quite rule out sex-blind random choice, but it’s on the edge of statistical likelihood, and we have a better option.

    3) It seems fair to say that readers have their preferences and vote them (which after all is the point of voting). It also seems likely that their preferences include a 10% skew in favour of either a masculine or feminine writing style.

    So where does this skew come from?

    I think the most likely place is the 39/61 female-male sex ration in the voter base, which the clever students will already have noticed is 11% skewed. Thus our results are explained if men on average have a slight preference for the masculine writing style and women a slight preference for the feminine style and they vote their honest preferences. It can only be a slight preference, because a strong preference would drive the results towards hypothesis 1 or 2, and we just don’t see that.

    This doesn’t mean that there is no patriarchy or old-boy network or other mechanisms which deliberately or unconciously work to keep women off the ballots, just that their effort doesn’t rise above statistical background noise. Which makes them pretty pathetic, if that’s the best they can do.

    In fact less than pathetic, because when it comes to winning Hugos rather than just getting nominated, women, represented among writers at 24%, nominated at 16%, are winning them at a rate of 40% (at least in the novel category). This is 2.25x more frequently than we could expect on nominations and 1.6x more likely than we expect on representation, and so is a significant outlier. Far from being discriminated against it seems that women are thriving at the awards podium – at least in the novel category which is the only one I’ve looked at here.

    So based on this I have to agree with those women who think amending the Hugo rules to increase their representation is not only un-necessary but diminishing. There’s no need. To quote Aretha and Annie – Sisters are doing it for themselves.

    I emphasize that this analysis goes only as far as it’s data, which isn’t so very far really. This is a pretty cursory once-over, and there’s a lot that could be done to improve it – and quite likely find things I haven’t. In particular it would be good to get bigger and more random samples off Gnod and the worldcon database, and to examine winners in every Hugo category and not just the novels. I’ve also used some simplifying assumptions about the voting process which could use unsimplifying. Please feel free to, I’d like to see what results people come up with.

    Cheers!

    Paul

41. Cheryl Morgan on August 28, 2009 8:29 am

    My goodness, there’s a lot of stuff come in. I think I will make several separate comments on different topics (and I’m very much wishing for threaded comments here). Let’s take a couple of easy ones first.

    Gary: Thank you very much for mentioning Susan Wood. She sounds to have been an amazing person and I’m very sad not to have got a chance to meet her. I think I’m right in saying she’s the only woman besides me to have won the Best Fan Writer Hugo.

    Paul: Very impressive numbers, but actually all of those vampire books and Harry Potter books are absolute eligible for a Hugo. Potter even won one year. So I’m afraid your numbers are probably wrong.

42. Cheryl Morgan on August 28, 2009 8:43 am

    OK, let’s start on some of the serious stuff. I’d like to begin by addressing the issue of membership cost, and note that all this talk about attending membership costs is largely irrelevant to discussion of the Hugos. You do not have to attend Worldcon to vote. It does not matter where in the world the convention is, you can still vote. (Changing the Hugo rules is another matter.)

    The fact that voting costs around $50 is definitely an issue, and various people are trying to do something about that, from arguing for a lower cost to working on the Voter Package in order to make that $50 more worth the money.

    But let’s come back to the travel thing for a while. Yes, there is a group of regular Worldcon attendees who see the event as their annual summer holiday, and go every year. We shamelessly take advantage of their love for travel. But Worldcon travels around the world because it wants to bring the convention to the fans, not force them to come to it. Look at the alternatives. Dragon*Con? In Atlanta every year. ComicCon? In San Diego every year. Worldcon might come to you infrequently, but for many people it does come, and we are always looking for new places to go.

    Also don’t assume that if Worldcon is in North America that all American fans can afford to go. Your average American fan can no more afford to fly around the country on a whim than your average British fan can afford to fly around Europe – less so in fact as they don’t has quite to same level of budget airlines. For most Worldcons the majority of attendees are not people who go regularly, they are people who can only afford to go because the convention has come to them.

    Most of what I’m currently doing with Worldcon is trying to use the magic of the Internet to bring the convention to the fans in a much broader sense. There are thousands of fans all around the world who have been to Worldcon, and who might go more often if they could afford it. Thousands more live in countries like Brazil, India and China and have never been but would love to do so. If we can get some of those people involved, on a annual basis, though an online aspect to the convention, we’ll have a much broader membership base.

43. Cheryl Morgan on August 28, 2009 9:30 am

    Back to Paul for a moment.

    women, represented among writers at 24%, nominated at 16%, are winning them at a rate of 40%

    As I pointed out earlier, the contention that women only represent 24% of writers is completely wrong because Paul excluded many eligible books written by women from his analysis.

    As to the other numbers, far from being evidence that there is no problem, they are firm evidence that there is one. If the system was working properly we would expect the % of winners to be closely reflected in the % of nominees. So if only 16% of nominees are women then they should only win 16% of the time. The fact that they win much more often suggests that the women who do get nominated are, on average, much better then the men who get nominated. And that in turn is because it is so much harder for a woman to get nominated than for a man.

    Or, as Yonmei put it a while back, there are quite a few men who get on the ballot only because they are men.

44. Kevin Standlee on August 28, 2009 10:33 am

    …but the majority of SF/F fans in this instance have no vote to change it, and no real means of ever getting a vote to change it. In effect, this argument is “Worldcon fans are slans”.

    WSFS has never claimed to include “every science fiction fan in the world.” It’s a club, albeit a rather large one, just like NESFA or BASFA or LASFS. The members of a club get to set their own rules, and are under no obligation to change those rules (within the constraints of law, of course) just because people who aren’t members of the club don’t like those rules.

    Simply complaining that “it’s not fair!” won’t get you very far. WSFS is under no compulsion to change its rules to suit non-members any more than the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is under any compulsion to make changes to the Academy Awards just because you don’t like what movies and actors and actresses win Oscars.

    Also, I submit that just making voting cheaper — while something I hope happens in the medium-term future — won’t actually make you much happier, because it’s unlikely to remove the bias you perceive to be in the results. To do that, you’d have to modify the nature of the voters, not just increase their numbers.

45. Gary Farber on August 28, 2009 1:15 pm

    “Because if you are trying to make a claim that the Hugo nomination process is not sexist and therefore does not need to be fixed, you need to cherry-pick your data quite, quite carefully. One way to do that is to keep arguing that if Connie Willis can win 15 Hugos plainly it’s not sexist: another way (and Gary Farber is not the first man fan I’ve seen to try this strategy) is to focus on a short era about 30+ years ago.”

    I was not making, and did not make, any such claims.

    Discussions that presume bad faith on the part of others don’t tend to be productive.

46. Yonmei on August 28, 2009 1:50 pm

    To get the comments of Cheryl and Kevin about an extraneous matter to the key point about Hugo nominees over in a oner:

    Cheryl: Yes, there is a group of regular Worldcon attendees who see the event as their annual summer holiday, and go every year.

    And I was making clear to people – such as Kevin – who were focussed on the amendment to the Constitution issue – that I am not one of these people, nor ever will be: it’s not within my powers to campaign on an amendment to the Constitution, because I’m neither financially nor geographically able to do so. Not that this is particularly relevant, as I’m sure you understand: the ultimate goal is not “Can I amend the Constitution?” but “What can I do to fix the male-bias in the Hugo awards?” And yes, I’m perfectly aware that this applies to a majority of fans – it’s not a complaint, it’s an explanation.

    The members of a club get to set their own rules, and are under no obligation to change those rules (within the constraints of law, of course) just because people who aren’t members of the club don’t like those rules.

    But Kevin, right now and until the next Worldcon, I am a member of the club. True, I won’t be this time next year because I won’t be going to the next Worldcon. The majority of members of the club are never going to be able to change the rules of the club: because the majority of members of the club are never going to be able to vote in two business meetings consecutively. In this specific instance, intentionally, the majority have no rights.

    Simply complaining that “it’s not fair!” won’t get you very far

    Well, no, not with regard to WSFS membership and voting rights: it’s structured to prevent most members from being able to make changes, and most Worldcon attendees don’t really care one way or the other anyway.

    Also, I submit that just making voting cheaper — while something I hope happens in the medium-term future — won’t actually make you much happier, because it’s unlikely to remove the bias you perceive to be in the results.

    Of course. Expanding the pool of those with the right to nominate new works and vote for shortlisted nominees from Worldcon members only, to anyone who cared enough to buy a Hugo-voting membership, would change the Hugos in all sorts of ways – but it would not remove the societal bias against women writers. I still think it would be a good thing to do: changing the societal bias against women writers is a much larger and more ongoing task.

47. Yonmei on August 28, 2009 1:54 pm

    Paul: Yonmei asks at the beginning of this that someone check the stats for the number of books actually published by male and female authors respectively. I’ve looked into this, and this is what I’ve found.

    Paul, I agree with Cheryl’s analysis of your results – the numbers are wrong! – but I want to thank you for going to the trouble and showing your working and your methodology. I was wondering how we’d come up with some of this kind of data, and you’ve given me some interesting ideas.

48. Kevin Standlee on August 28, 2009 1:58 pm

    because the majority of members of the club are never going to be able to vote in two business meetings consecutively.

    You had me until you threw in “able.” Leave that word out and the sentence is true, but only because most of the eligible members choose not to exercise their franchise.

    A majority of the members are able to vote — they just do not do so. This is not the same thing.

    In this specific instance, intentionally, the majority have no rights.

    FWIW, I have from time to time floated what I call “popular ratification” — changing the rules to require that the ratification of constitutional amendments be done, not at the following year’s Business Meeting, but by a vote of the members, probably handled in parallel to Site Selection. The Business Meeting would retain the right to originate constitutional amendments, but the membership as a whole, through a ballot of the following year’s members, would have the right of ratification. This would allow supporting members to vote on ratification.

    While I think this would give the existing constitution a bit more credibility, I also don’t think it would change much; however, I also don’t think the Business Meeting would ever vote to reduce its already-highly-limited authority.

49. Yonmei on August 28, 2009 2:04 pm

    You had me until you threw in “able.” Leave that word out and the sentence is true, but only because most of the eligible members choose not to exercise their franchise.

    Well, in the sense that I “choose” not to be wealthy enough to be a regular Worldcon attendee, yes, that’s true. But do you think it’s really helpful to argue that the only reason the majority of WSFS members are not able to exercise their voting rights in two consecutive Worldcons is because they “choose” not to be able to be physically present at Business Meetings two years in a row? As Cheryl points out: most people go to Worldcons when they’re nearby. Most WSFS members, therefore, are not attending members for two years in a row, and are therefore not able to vote in Business Meetings two years in a row. Wealth, for most people, is not choice but circumstance…

50. Kevin Standlee on August 28, 2009 2:10 pm

    There are thousands of WSFS members who attend multiple Worldcons and never show up at the Business Meeting (nor do they regularly vote in the Hugo Awards). Those are the ones I’m talking about. Forget about the people who only attend the ones near them. Even the regular attendees don’t go to the BM very often, if ever. That’s what I mean about most WSFS members choosing not to attend.

    This is not much different from how people exercise their franchise in mundane life. Look at what a pitiful percentage of the eligible voting population (not just the registered voters) actually casts ballots. Most people can’t be bothered.

51. Cheryl Morgan on August 28, 2009 2:42 pm

    Coming back to the overnight (for me) material, I’d like to address this issue of WSFS members not caring about the Hugos. It is a well known fact that less than 20% of Worldcon members exercise their right to vote in the awards. From that it is very easy to jump to the conclusion that “WSFS members” don’t care. But it is a mistake to think of Worldcon attendees as a single, homogeneous group.

    At a typical Worldcon around 20% of the membership comes from people who attend the convention regularly. The rest are people who attend irregularly at best, and may only attend that one event. The regulars are a diverse group made up of fans of different types (and nationalities), writers, artists, editors and dealers. Precisely because they are regulars, that group does care. I have no data (because voting is secret) but my guess is that the majority of Hugo voters come from that group.

    What about the others? Do they not care? Obviously some don’t, but the reasons people give for not voting are many and various. One of the most common is “I’m not eligible”, which is not a misunderstanding of the rules, but rather an excessively strict view of the level of expertise required in order to be “allowed” to vote. Such people apparently care far too much about what is, after all, a popular vote award.

    Are there people outside of the WSFS membership who care and would vote if they could? The conservatives will say “no”, on the grounds that anyone who really cared about the Hugos would be prepared to pay their $50. Personally I think we should meet people half way. A substantially lower voting fee would attract a lot more people who do care, but who find $50 too much of a barrier to participation. On the other hand, free voting would, I think, attract a lot of people who really didn’t care, which might not be a good thing.

52. Madeline F on August 28, 2009 10:22 pm

    Can we do other wild ideas here? A thought arises from Cheryl Morgan’s: “Are there people outside of the WSFS membership who care and would vote if they could? The conservatives will say “no”, on the grounds that anyone who really cared about the Hugos would be prepared to pay their $50.”

    The thought is, how about allowing the option to make the Hugo Voting Membership support other worthwhile science fiction causes? The default would be $50 to the WSFS, but you could choose instead to have (a guess) just the $5 for Hugo administration go to the WSFS and the other $45 go to the National Space Society, or the Carl Brandon Society, or the SETI Institute, or whatever else passed muster.

    That would make the membership worth it.

53. Gary Farber on August 28, 2009 10:42 pm

    “The thought is, how about allowing the option to make the Hugo Voting Membership support other worthwhile science fiction causes?”

    It’s a thoughtful suggestion, but the problem is that there’s no way you could ever get a set of people of as disparate ideas and natures as show up to Worldcon to ever agree on any specific given set of causes.

    Trying to do this very thing caused a huge and famous incident at the 1969 Worldcon, St. Louiscon, when a movie screen tore, and the convention committee couldn’t afford to pay the hotel for it, so a famous sf author leaped up to implore fans to donate money for this cause, so that Worldcon wouldn’t be left unable to pay its bills, which at the time would have left the individual members of the committee on the hook, if my memory is is correct that that con was prior to any sf cons incorporating as a non-profit or at all.

    A bucket was taken about. Lots of members put money in.

    When the money donated turned out to be far more than was needed to take care of the deficit caused by the torn movie screen, the author thought it was a good idea to decide, after consulting only a few people, to turn the remainder over to the Clarion SF Workshop, a cause the author assumed everyone would support.

    Instead, even something as anondyne as that became a scandal that was argued about for years. At the time, there was practically a storming of the event led by many fans, that such a decision had been made without any kind of vote or procedure, although exactly what should alternatively should have been done never seems to have been something universally agreed upon, either.

    Which just amplifies the point.

    I could bore you with a list of subsequent issues fans haven’t agreed with that have caused huge fights, and even boycotts of worldcons over, but I trust you’ll get the point.

    Which is: there isn’t anything outside WSFS that members of WSFS will find “passed muster” as something appropriate outside of WSFS to support. No matter how good the cause, now sf-related the cause, how much it’s within the field of sf: nothing. A bunch of fans will always object.

    I don’t even see that an option for choosing one or two or a limited set of sub-options for part of your membership fee to go to as chosen from a vast set of possibilities would fly.

    The majority of BM attendees, I predict from long experience, just wouldn’t think it an appropriate idea for WSFS to officially support anything than WSFS.

    Most would, I predict, simply opine that people are free to spend their own money to support whatever other goals they like, within the field or without, and WSFS should stick to WSFS business, period, end of story.

    Please do not kill this messenger for making this prediction, which I’d be very surprised to find Cheryl or Kevin, for instance, disagreeing with as a prediction. Fans considered as an overall group are pretty silly. But also predictable.

    Very good job of thinking outside the box, though; wish I could be more optimistic that it would fly, but I’d be astonished if Business Meeting fandom had changed enough since I last attended a Worldcon Business Meeting (in 1989) for it to be otherwise.

    Put two fans together, get twenty opinions, forcefully argued.

54. Yonmei on August 29, 2009 5:06 am

    Madelaine: The thought is, how about allowing the option to make the Hugo Voting Membership support other worthwhile science fiction causes? The default would be $50 to the WSFS, but you could choose instead to have (a guess) just the $5 for Hugo administration go to the WSFS and the other $45 go to the National Space Society, or the Carl Brandon Society, or the SETI Institute, or whatever else passed muster.

    I don’t think that would be fair to the Worldcon hosting the Hugo award ceremony – they have to pay for making the Hugo awards, hosting the ceremony, etc. Even the volunteer labour has costs.

    In the UK, it’s traditional for many convention to have a charity to which profits are donated – if any. The charity’s one which in the opinion of the concommittee will have broad uncontroversial support – which may not of course be possible in the US. *weak grin*

    Declaring that once a convention has wound up its accounts anything over will be donated to a specific charity or charities named early on, would work. But I still think that given a Hugo-voting-only membership carries significantly less costs than a supporting membership, it ought to cost less. If supporting membership usually costs $50, then let the Hugo-voting membership cost half that which is also the price of two paperbacks. Why not?

55. Paul Chafe on August 29, 2009 5:56 am

    Harry Potter and Vampires are Hugo eligible? Hmmm – well, that certainly shows how much I track the Hugos.

    However to be clear, I didn’t actually EXCLUDE HP or Vampire titles, I just didn’t use the methodology of counting Amazon.com titles because I erroneously thought it included non-eligible books. Instead I used a different methodology based on counting writers using Gnod. The statistics I quoted are valid for the sample I did use, and, whatever biases it may contain, an exclusionary bias is not one of them.

    However, never one to pass up an opportunity to extend the database, I’ve re-run the numbers using Amazon’s top 100 sellers list.

    Methodology

    I used the top 100 selling SF titles on Amazon, and excluded anthologies (because I couldn’t necessarily get all the writers in them) and ambiguous names, and then repeated the experiment using the top 100 selling SF& fantasy titles on Amazon. It was WAY easier and faster to do this count than it was to do the same on Gnod.

    Sources
    http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/books/25/ref=pd_ts_pg_1

    http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/books/16272/ref=pd_ts_b_nav

    Bias

    1) Excluding anthologies limits us (more or less) to the novel category, but that’s what I’m working with in the interests of faster research.

    2) This is by no means a Hugo eligible sample. Mary Shelley is on there (and she probably should have a Hugo for Frankenstein) Anyone know if she’s got a retro?

    3) These are bestsellers, which means they are popular. This is sometimes but not always the same as “good”. Presumably in the Hugos we’re looking to reward quality over quantity. However they are all included, to remove any personal bias I might have (actually I have lots) over what counts as “good”.

    4) Amazon’s numbers shift constantly, and there may be artifacts in both their own methodology, and in the market. I know for awhile the top 100 was full of Star Wars titles, and now there aren’t any to be found.

    5) As per usual, ambiguous names are discarded. I don’t think this is a bias, but it should be mentioned.

    Data for writers in SF and SF&F genres found in Amazon top 100

    SF titles (ie, no fantasy novels)

    Count Percent
    Male 68 76%
    Female 21 24%

    SF&F titles (including fantasy novels)

    Count Percent
    Male 38 43%
    Female 50 57%

    It should be noted that the SF&F list contains vampire writer Charlaine Harris no less than 20 times, and that vampire/horror fiction writers accounts for 38 of the 50 female entries on this list, or an astonishing 76%, most of them with multiple entries. Perhaps not relevant, but interesting.

    A couple of interesting things fall out of this data.

    1) The top 100 SF section statistics are within a few fractions of a percentage points of the results I got counting authors on Gnod. In this case, my entire previous analysis holds. That is, the demographics of the SF writer and reader populations, combined with honest reader preference is enough to explain the difference in male/female success rates in the Hugos. We don’t need to invoke the deliberate or unconcious sex bias at the level of Hugo selection. Of course this does not preclude patriarchy influence at other levels within the the SF field.

    2) The SF&F statistics are wildly different from the previous onces. My previous analysis doesn’t hold for this sample, so we need to do some more some digging.

    Analysis

    1) The personal bias I mentioned in my first selection (non-random selection of writer names based on my personal idea of who is prominent) turns out to indicate that I’m an SF fan, but not an S&SF fan. (I’d agree with this assessment) However given that we confine the discussion to SF, my Gnod methodology is looking more valid – which is to say Gnod’s idea of SF based on my idea of author prominence corresponds to Amazon’s. We can continue to use the Gnod data, but only for the SF subgenre and not the fantasy subgenre.

    2) There is a marked difference in the sex of SF writers vs SF&F writers in this sample. Specifically, women are 2.3x more likely to be S&SF writers than SF writers. This finding supports the finding under the Gnod data that there is a tangible difference in male and female writing styles, which might in turn be reflected in male and female reading preferences. Again this is not implausible, since there are markets and genres which aim specifically (and effectively) at just one sex.

    3) 76% female SF&F writers in Amazon’s top 100 write vampire fiction. This may or may not be relevant, but it’s certainly interesting. It does support the idea that there are identifiable male and female writing styles.

    4) For the SF&F sample the Hugos appear to be biased, since the demographics identified in my earlier work will not explain how 57% of the writers come up with 16% of the nominations and 40% of the awards. However since women write more fantasy than men there is a confounding variable, and we cannot tell if this bias is against fantasy novels or female writers. In fact the Hugos could be narrowly biased against vampire fiction, and because so many women are writing vampire stories this alone could explain the results.

    So let’s find out which it is.

    I went over the actual best novel nominees for the last twenty years (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Award_for_Best_Novel). Note that this doesn’t correspond to the data in my previous post, which only went back 10 years.

    Nominees by category and sex.

    Male Female
    Fantasy 3(42%) 4(57%)
    SF 76(80%) 18(20%)

    Which is to say that when we account for sub-genre the number of male and female nominees is a close match for the number of male and female writers in that sub-genre, as shown in the Amazon.com data and the Gnod data.

    Specifically for the SF sub-genre:
    Gnod Amazon SF Hugo nominees
    Male writers 76% 76% 80%
    Female writers 24% 24% 20%

    The 4% discrepency in nominees is within the bounds of statistical uncertainty.

    For the fantasy subgenre
    Amazon F&SF Hugo nominees
    Male writers 43% 43%
    Female writers 57% 57%

    However when we look at the kinds of fiction the Hugos like to reward, we see a different story

    Count Percent
    Fantasy nominees 7 7%
    SF nominees 94 94%

    So SF novels get nominated 13.5x more often than fantasy novels. The Hugos are most definitely biased, but they’re biased against fantasy writers, not female writers. Male and female writers are represented in the Hugos in close proportion to their presence in the subgenres of fantasy and SF. However because women are more represented in the excluded fantasy group and less represented in the SF group, they are getting less nominations overall.

    Now lets look at who actually takes home a rocket.

    Noms Wins
    Female Hard 18 8 44%
    Female Fantasy 4 2 50%
    Male Hard 76 10 14%
    Male Fantasy 3 1 33%

    Total Male 11 52%
    Total Female 10 48%

    Which is to say women have won just about half the Hugos for best novel in the last 20 years, despite most women writing in the biased-against fantasy subgenre and the 3:1 preponderance of males in the biased-for SF subgenre. Women have been in the running 17 times for a hugo in the last 20 years, and when there is at least one woman in the running, a woman wins 59% of the time.

    Conclusion

    So far as the Hugo’s go, women are represented in their sub-genres of fantasy and SF in proportion to the number of women working in those genres. The lower absolute number of women nominated for Hugos is explained by a systemic bias against fantasy work, which women writers have a demonstrated preference for. Nominated female writers outperform male writers in actually winning Hugos in both sub-genres. .

    I’ll therefore stand by my original analysis. Sisters are doing it for themselves. A Hugo rule to increase female representation directly seems un-neccessary. However a Hugo rule to increase fantasy writer representation – or even separate “Best Novel” categories for fantasy and SF, would probably be a good idea, as fantasy writers are heavily discriminated against.

    Of course this analysis does not address potential patriarchal issues inside the field of SF but outside of the Hugo selection process. However this is actually a pretty interesting study, so I’m going to look into that next.

    Cheers all!

    Paul

56. Kevin Standlee on August 29, 2009 12:50 pm

    Declaring that once a convention has wound up its accounts anything over will be donated to a specific charity or charities named early on, would work.

    The WSFS Constitution discusses the subject of surplus funds at section 2.9.3:
    

    2.9.3: Each Worldcon or NASFiC Committee should dispose of surplus funds remaining after accounts are settled for its convention for the benefit of WSFS as a whole.

    When people talk about “donating to charity,” what I don’t think a lot of people seem to realize is that most American and Canadian Worldcons are charities already. SFSFC, which ran the 1993 and 2002 Worldcons, for instance, is a registered 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. All recent American Worldcons have been run by similar 501(c)(3) charities. The very nature of running SF conventions is considered sufficient grounds for being a charity in the USA. A lot of people seem to have a far more narrow view of what a charity is, such as, “It’s only a charity if you give money to poor people” or something like that.

    Getting back to how Worldcons dispose of surplus funds: for the past twenty years, most Worldcons (there was one exception early on) have participated in “Pass-Along Funds,” a program whereby Worldcons that run a surplus pledge to divide at least half of their surplus among the next three Worldcons, as long as those Worldcons make the same commitment.

    (Remember, most Worldcons are charities already, and even if they technically are not because their host country’s laws are more narrowly drawn than the USA’s, the holding of a Worldcon qualifies as a legitimate purpose for donations from a US-based 501(c)(3) that was set up for that purpose.)

    So half of a Worldcon’s surplus (should it run one — some Worldcons have lost money, such as Nippon 2007, which reported a JPY3.7 million loss) is already committed to helping future Worldcons. You can see me and my fellow ConJose co-chair Tom Whitmore handing over PAF to our successors in the ConJose Photo Gallery.

    Other provisions of section 2.9 require Worldcons to report on the disposition of their remaining surplus funds. That’s why the early potion of the Preliminary Business Meeting is the receipt of financial reports from Worldcons. Those reports were in the agenda packet this year and will eventually appear in the meeting minutes.

    Also, there is an existing WSFS Standing Resolution (1982-1) that attempts to guide Worldcons further regarding the disposition of surplus funds.

    All of this stems from the basic fact that each Worldcon is a separate legal entity. If Worldcons were all run by the same organization each year, they would almost certainly build up a sufficient reserve that they could afford to lower the membership price. I estimate that Worldcon memberships are overpriced by at least 15% simply because individual Worldcons have no financial reserve.

57. Gary Farber on August 29, 2009 1:12 pm

    Since your link, Kevin, doesn’t go directly to the relevant portion of a page with a lot of text, I’m going to suggest that anyone interested in the topic of Worldcons spending funds do a “find” on the page for the word “funds,” and I’m going to quote what you referred to here, which I’d forgotten about, which is from 1982 — a year I was Director of Ops, and Assistant Director of the Services Division, and may or may not have had time to attend the BM — which partially puts paid to my claim, and I thank you for the reminder and implied correction:
    

    BM-1982-1

    Whereas recent Worldcons have had, and future Worldcons can expect to have, significant excess funds following the close of the convention;
    And whereas there has been considerable debate and discussion in the past about the appropriate uses for these funds;
    And whereas there are many organizations that would be worthy recipients of such funds;
    And whereas it is difficult to choose which of the many worthy organizations should receive said funds;
    Be it resolved that the following organizations are considered by the World Science Fiction Society to be among those worthy to receive donations:
    a. recognized fan charities, such as TAFF, DUFF, GUFF, TOFF and the FAAn Awards;
    b. established national fan organizations, such as the NFFF and the Fantasy Artists Network;
    c. PBS, NPR, and their local affiliates, for the production and/or sponsorship of science fiction programming; and
    d. future Worldcon committees.

    NOTE:

    The above motion as originally proposed also listed “Small, established regional conventions;”, “Established local fan organizations, especially IRS code 501(c)3-recognized not-for-profit organizations;”, and “Local public libraries, for improvements to their science fiction collections;”. These were specifically deleted from the list of acceptable recipients by vote of the Business Meeting.

    So there was that much agreement, at least, then.

58. Kevin Standlee on August 29, 2009 1:17 pm

    Since your link, Kevin, doesn’t go directly to the relevant portion of a page with a lot of text,…

    That’s why I listed the specific resolution number (1982-1), which, if you search for it, will take you straight to the resolution.

    The pages on the WSFS web site to not provide sub-links to specific paragraphs or years within the governing documents.

59. Gary Farber on August 29, 2009 1:23 pm

    “Harry Potter and Vampires are Hugo eligible?”

    Whatever the voters nominate that meet the requirements requiring time and specifics of publication are eligible for the Hugo; there are no rules, let alone attempt or intent to enforce any, on content. It’s purely up to the voters to democratically decide.

    Individuals, of course, often argue their personal opinions furiously, denounce the opinions of others, etc. How dare you consider X eligible! Obviously it doesn’t meet criterion Y! :-)

    Save that decisions that once were made by con committees, then subsequently by Hugo sub-committees, and nowadays by appointed Hugo Administrators, are final, unless over-turned by the BM. I don’t think any of these has attempted to exclude anything based on perceived sf/fantasy content. Corrections on my fallible memory welcome.

    (The World Fantasy juried Award is a different story, as are other awards within the field.)

    Rulings on defining sf or fantasy would be an impossible can of worms for WSFS to open. Fans have never agreed on definitions, or explicit boundaries, though lots of people, probably most, have personal opinions.

    And “fantasy” is explicitly eligible in the rules, as well as having been obviously eligible by virtue of what’s won since clear fantasy, by any definition, won Hugos by 1958 (Avram Davidson’s “Or All The Sea With Oysters”), 1959 (Robert Bloch’s “That Hell-Bound Train”), etc.

60. Kevin Standlee on August 29, 2009 1:29 pm

    I don’t think any of these has attempted to exclude anything based on perceived sf/fantasy content.

    Not in the fiction categories, but a “not sufficiently part of the category definition” ruling happened in 1989. Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time was ruled ineligible for Best Non-Fiction Book (the category title at the time) on the grounds that its subject matter was not “science fiction, fantasy, or fandom,” whereupon the Business Meeting amended the definition to include “or related subjects,” which didn’t help that particular work of course, since it takes two years to amend the Constitution.

    Generally speaking, Hugo Administrators are highly reluctant to make qualitative rulings, leaving that up to the voters. The analogy I’ve seen and used myself is that the Administrator is the judge and makes rulings on matters of law (length, date of publication), while the voters are the jury and make rulings on matters of fact (is the work SF or Fantasy? Is it worthy of a Hugo Award?).

61. Gary Farber on August 29, 2009 2:01 pm

    Another item that just popped back into my memory was the huge set of arguments in 1996 when “Apollo 13,” the movie, was nominated for Best Dramatic Presentation, and a lot of fans were irate on the grounds that it wasn’t science fiction, but history, and though not a documentary, that it was barely fiction of any kind.

    But, again, it was left up to the voters, enough of whom apparently felt either that a slightly fictionalized/docudrama counted, on ground that it was fiction having to do with science, or space travel, or who simply loved the film, and wanted to reward it.

    It’s certainly an excellent film.

62. Gary Farber on August 29, 2009 2:02 pm

    Apologies if we’re wandering too far off-topic. I realize this is a feminist space, and apologize if I shouldn’t have digressed so far from the original topic. I’ll try shutting up more now.

63. Trisha W. on September 1, 2009 11:18 pm

    I remember chatting with you from the Worldcon Panel and afterwords. :) Sorry it took so long for me to respond. We’ll be posting a summary and link to the Broad Universe discussion list, so you may get more additions…

    In any case, here’s my two cents.

    Rather than making an amendment which will, inevitably, create a backlash from men and women alike who are at best uncomfortable and at worst, vehement against filling a quota – or the appearance of filling a quota – why can’t women take a more active role?

    Vote. Nominate.

    It’s about $40 (American) to get a supporting membership where one can make nominations and vote. All those who are attending Worldcon: nominate and vote.

    Do you know how many people I have known – mostly women – who were at least supporting members and neither nominated nor voted? What change would or could their voices have made?

    To bring more women into the light: review. Women – send your books and stories out to be reviewed. One of the things we’ve noticed in Broad Universe is that women STILL DO NOT promote themselves – or even submit their work! – as often as men.

    In my conventioning, I’ve met several editors who want to receive submissions and reviews from women – who would love women to be regular reviewers.

    Yes, women are still very often bound with double duty of running a home and family far more than men, but you know what? Most recent biology studies also says women are better hard-wired for multitasking.

    Forcing a ballot to include women will cause more backlash and degenerate the honor that should be rightly bestowed upon the winner if she were a woman (“She only won because she was a woman.” That crap still happens so frequently – no matter how much a woman deserves her honor or works her ass off for it). Forcing a ballot to include women also avoids the greater problem – the lack of promotion and awareness of women writers.

    As a sf/f community, as women, we need to put ourselves out there, promote ourselves, and promote each other. Organizations are doing this – look at what Sisters in Crime has done for Mystery Authors! Broad Universe is 10 years old and we have made quite a significant presence of women already (see our stats on our webpage). If we continue to promote each other and ourselves, there won’t be a need for this amendment. People will know who we are and that we deserve our equal place as award-winners.

64. Madeline F on September 1, 2009 11:26 pm

    Back to the Hugo Voting Membership. Gary Farber: And again: 1969. The median age in the USA is 36.4. I’m quite aware, as Kevin Standlee points out, that the worldcons are charities: they are charities devoted to providing a hell of a fun gathering for a people whose mores, you say, were fixed years before most Americans were born.

    But there is a bright spot: I think you’re getting the point of your story wrong way around. I can very much see the annoyance of the people who had their money diverted to a cause they had no say in.

    Perhaps I should take a moment to mention again Yonmei’s point that almost no one can be a part of the miniature democracy that sets the rules of the WSFS.

    Yonmei: And I did suggest that the part of the Hugo Voting Membership that actually supports the Hugo award remain untouched, when I suggested allowing people some choice in where their money went. My guess was that of all the funds handled by each worldcon, 10% was for the administration of the award (hiring the hall for the ceremony, getting the awards designed and manufactured, maintaining the databases, etc)… Thus, $5 of each $50 in my suggestion.

    I view it as a feature, that the Hugo Voting Membership buyers would not be required to fund a party that they can’t, for whatever reason, attend. Now, whether it should be possible to buy a Hugo Voting Membership with $5 to the Hugos alone; or $5 to the Hugos and only say $20 to SETI; or the full $50 coughed up to someone…. That’s not a choice either you or I will have a chance of making.

65. Kevin Standlee on September 1, 2009 11:40 pm

    And I did suggest that the part of the Hugo Voting Membership that actually supports the Hugo award remain untouched, when I suggested allowing people some choice in where their money went. My guess was that of all the funds handled by each worldcon, 10% was for the administration of the award….

    Actually trying to split costs in the way you describe is far more difficult than you think. Much of the cost of a Worldcon is fixed expenses. You talk of “hiring the hall.” Well, you don’t usually get charged an avoidable expense you can track as “Hugo night only,” and furthermore, the tech gear you brought in was rented for all of the events. But unless you have several different events in there “sharing” the expense, you might not be able to rent it at all, so it’s not as though you can name an exact figure and say, “If we didn’t hold the Hugo Awards, we would spend this much less money.”

    The amount of money a Worldcon gets after subtracting the true variable cost of a supporting membership (that’s the cost of publications and mailings to the member, primarily) goes to a charity: the Worldcon itself. That’s why it’s called a supporting membership. It helps the Worldcon cover a really stupendous amount of fixed costs (like renting convention centers).

    But I get the impression that many people don’t think of organizing international literary conferences as a “real” charity.

    Anyway, the underlying issue here with the memberships is that because WSFS rules tie the initial cost of an attending membership to the cost of voting, Worldcon committees, who understandably don’t want to sell attending memberships for less than the variable cost of providing the membership, are sort of forced to overprice voting (and thus supporting memberships).

    One of the ways to bring down the cost of supporting memberships would be to disconnect the initial cost of a Worldcon attending membership from the cost of voting/supporting membership. But the last attempt to do this (2006) failed. I don’t know when we’ll see another attempt.

66. Yonmei on September 2, 2009 3:16 am

    Trish, there are arguments one way and another against the Joanna Russ Amendment, but the one argument I have no time for, ever, is “It will create a backlash!” When men perceive their male privilege dissolving, this creates a backlash – as Feludi notes in her eponymous work, backed up by Dale Spender’s statistics in Invisible Women, men perceive themselves as having an absolute right to a larger share of resources: when they see that absolute right under threat, even while they still have the larger share of resources, that provokes the backlash.

    (Spender discovered that, in a class divided about 50/50 between boys and girls, any effort made by the teacher to spend any more than 30% of her attention on the girls, was perceived in the classroom by girls, boys, and the teacher herself, as giving an unfair share of her attention to the girls: this was in the course of a study where teachers were recording their classes and tracking time spent talking to boys and girls. Similiar patterns of “more than a third is an unfairly high share for women” were recorded in group conversations with about equal numbers of women and men present.)

    Joanna Russ notes in How to Suppress Women’s Writing that in literary journals and the like, more than 5% of the available space is regarded as more than a fair share for women writers: as we saw recently, it occurred to none of the people in the process of putting together an anthology of Mindblowing SF to wonder why they were compiling an all-male anthology.

    As Jim C. Hines notes: All-male shortlists are regarded as normal, and that’s what has to change. The normality for most people in the small group who do nominate for Hugos is to think of men writers first and women second. (Oddly enough, one consequence of this Amendment for me is that, having discovered that in a just world Nancy Kress would have been shortlisted for a Hugo three times in the past ten years, I picked up one of her novels from the library for the first time – I’d been seeing her on the edge of my vision for a while now – and I’m really enjoying it. Quakers In Space!)

    But: blaming women for not buying more new hardback SF/F and not buying more supporting memberships (for cons they cannot attend) is just another way of telling women “It’s YOUR fault! Do better! Be richer! Spend more!”

    “She only won because she was a woman.”

    Yes. People will keep saying that. Regardless of how we cringe and blame ourselves: that won’t stop them. What we need to keep pointing out is that, all too often, writers are only shortlisted because they’re men: ergo, they only win because they’re men.

67. Cheryl Morgan on September 2, 2009 6:51 am

    Madeline:

    I think you somewhat missed Gary’s point. The problem with designating an official Hugo charity is that for every fan who says, “great, I’ll vote because of that!” there will be another who says, “they are giving money to who??? I’ll never vote in the Hugos again, EVER!!!” It is just the way it goes.

    In practice, however, you do sort of get what you want. Almost every Worldcon ends up with a surplus, because if you are aiming to not make a loss you’ll always err on the side of positive cash flow. However, Worldcon committees are not allowed to take profits. The surplus money must either be forwarded to subsequent Worldcons or spent on good causes that benefit the SF&F community. It is down to individual Worldcons as to what causes they pick, but the Business Meeting does keep an eye on how surpluses are used.

    Which brings me to another point. There are lots of bad things about WSFS. We are trying to improve it, but change is very slow. I can understand that people get frustrated. I have been tempted to walk away many times myself. But then I ask myself, if Worldcon were to die (and a lot of the conservatives would be happy to see Worldcon die with them), what would replace it? I can’t see another international fan-run con getting started. It is just too hard. So we’d be left with things like Comic-Con and Dragon*Con, which don’t have an international focus, and which are commercial operations. So I stick with trying to reform WSFS, no matter how frustrating it might be at times.

68. Mary Robinette Kowal on September 3, 2009 3:21 pm

    Paul’s numbers match my understanding of the industry, that there are many more SF male writers than female writers. While Fantasy works are eligible for the Hugo there is a demonstrated bias toward nominating Science Fiction.

    In a juried award, I would complain about an all male short-list, but not with a nomination structure like WorldCon’s. If you want to see more women on the ballot I think the problem lies farther back in the process than this.

69. ian on September 3, 2009 3:32 pm

    I suppose it is impossible to determine for sure, but does anyone have any idea of the number of submissions to publishers by women compared to the number made by men? In other words is there a gender bias inbuilt before any of us ever see the work published? My impression is that many editors are women, but I don’t know how that holds true for SF, if indeed it is true at all.

    Is there any evidence that work by men gets a bigger promotional budget once accepted?

70. therem on September 3, 2009 4:30 pm

    FYI, the Joanna Russ Amendment was featured in a post on the Locus Roundtable blog yesterday. The slant is evident from the post title: No one wants a pity Hugo.

71. Christian A. Young’s Dimlight Archive | on October 13, 2009 6:45 pm

    [...] exactly a secret. You only have to look as far as a certain anthology, or consider the matter of gender bias where certain awards are concerned, [...]

72. Don’t Ignore the Problem. Call it Out. « Hypnerdic on October 22, 2009 3:28 am

    [...] writer is saying.  Look at the comments section for the article.  People are agreeing with this.  It has been argued that some of those people have positions of power over the literary field being discussed.  [...]

Leave a Reply

Recent Comments

• Synesthesia: Indeed. Love for everyone sounds a lot better than the sort of family structures folks like OSC believe in. All...
• Allen Shan: I don’t know what’s wrong with being gay. OSC make things complicated. The time your talking about has...
• Dan: Believe me, I don’t want to see the sexism. It fucks up my reading experience. So I’d really like Larry Niven to clean up...
• ian: written by women are: Arslan, The Dispossessed, The Female Man, Grass, The Lathe of Heaven, Where Late the Sweet Birds...
• therem: And to respond to the larger question, of what works by women are missing from the list, I’m pretty sure these...
• therem: Heh. I find reading lists like these amusing, so I’ll bite: Books by women: Arslan, The Dispossessed, The Female...
• Kaethe: I’m too embarrassed by what I haven’t read to play the list game, but I’m adding all the women to my...
• clarence: He should have asked each woman if she wanted to be displayed on that list, even though it is legal to do what he...

Recent Trackbacks

• my fat life: fantasy friday
• The Hathor Legacy: I Read the Internets – 4/21/07
• Alas, a blog: Open Thread (lightning strikes up from buried crystal caves edition)
• Godard’s Letterboxes: 100 sci fi women #46: Cord

Recent Posts

• Mostly Manly SF by Mostly Manly Men
• Bechel Tests and Babies
• Avert your eyes, girls, I get to look YOU over
• On access policies, conventions, and sausages
• The Homophobia Keeper
• Telling stories is how I think
• Hollywood sisterhood, or lack thereof

Archives

Select Month August 2010 July 2010 May 2010 April 2010 March 2010 January 2010 December 2009 October 2009 September 2009 August 2009 June 2009 May 2009 April 2009 March 2009 February 2009 January 2009 December 2008 November 2008 October 2008 September 2008 August 2008 July 2008 June 2008 May 2008 April 2008 March 2008 February 2008 January 2008 December 2007 November 2007 October 2007 September 2007 August 2007 July 2007 June 2007 May 2007 April 2007 March 2007 February 2007 January 2007 December 2006 November 2006 October 2006 September 2006 August 2006 July 2006 June 2006 May 2006 April 2006

Meta

• Register
• Log in
• Entries RSS
• Comments RSS
• WordPress.org