December 15th, 2009
by
Yonmei
Yesterday, James Chartrand, the founder of MenWithPens, came out: Why James Chartrand Wears Women’s Underpants:
Using a male pseudonym when you’re a woman isn’t anything new. Writers have been doing it for centuries. George Eliot, George Sand, Isak Dinesen. Even the Brontë sisters, championed today, wrote as Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell back in their time.
Why did they do it? To have their work accepted, because women weren’t supposed to be writers. Their work had a much better chance if their audience didn’t have to get over initial skepticism that a woman could write at all, much less do it well.
Since then, we’ve had feminism. We have the right to vote, to own property, to be members of Parliament and Congress, to get a job, and to be the main breadwinner of the family. And yet apparently we haven’t gotten past those 19th century stigmas.
The evidence was right there in front of me.
When James Chartrand wrote under her own name, she “struggled to get gigs — there was tough competition from more experienced hustlers. When I did manage to grab a job before someone else could, I worked hard and wrote well. I wanted to do my best. I earned $1.50 an article. I averaged $8 a week. I was treated like crap, too. Bossed around, degraded, condescended to, with jibes made about my having to work from home. I quickly learned not to mention I had kids. I quickly learned not to mention I worked from my kitchen table.” When she changed her name to James Chartrand, “Instantly, jobs became easier to get. There was no haggling. There were compliments, there was respect. Clients hired me quickly, and when they received their work, they liked it just as quickly. There were fewer requests for revisions — often none at all. Customer satisfaction shot through the roof. So did my pay rate.”
As Kate Harding on Salon notes (and many others round the blogosphere today) it’s not a shock so much as a sobering reminder of what happens when you write like a woman.
I’d been meaning to do a statistics-laden follow-up to my posts on the Joanna Russ Amendment (Late Business at the Hugo Awards), and been putting off writing it because I didn’t have time (seriously: I got back from Canada and fell into work, and the only reason I have time to post this now is because I am off work with a cold).
The statistics I wanted to gather had to do with the number of people who nominate writers and novels for Hugo Awards: to confirm the point that many people have made, that shortlists for the Hugos – the top six, the top fifteen – are voted into existance by a very small number of people.
Adrienne Martini suggests that “The solution is to get more women involved with fandom so that they are invested in voting for the award” but this seems to me to be as misguided as her apparent belief that if Ursula K. LeGuin had won a Hugo for “The Royals of Hegn”, this would have been a “pity Hugo”, awarded to LeGuin because women writers “can only succeed if the rules are changed”. (“The Royals of Hegn” would have been added to the short-story Hugo shortlist under the Joanna Russ Amendment rules in 2001.)
I have been involved in fandom since I was 16 – for over a quarter of a century. I’ve been to four Worldcons (though at the first one I didn’t hold a voting membership). Two in Glasgow, easy to commit to buying a membership since I could get there and back each day if I had to: and of course Anticipation in Montreal, an expensive holiday but a fun one. Not one I could afford to take every year, even if I were willing to travel to the US any more. I am involved in fandom: but voting for the Hugos would be far too expensive to commit to every year, and rule changes to make voting for the Hugos less expensive can only happen if a majority of regular Worldcon attendees agree that they want to let people vote for the Hugos who won’t be coming to the Worldcon. (The WSFS rules can only be successfully amended by majority vote at two WSFS business meetings in succession, and proxy votes are not permitted: therefore, you cannot hope to make a change in WSFS rules unless you are able to attend – not just buy a membership, but physically attend – on a regular basis. I watched as elderly regulars argued against and voted down rule-changes requiring Worldcons to make it easier for parents to attend Worldcon with their families, or young people to buy cheaper memberships, and formed the pretty strong conviction that most regular attenders at Worldcons do not want anything about their Worldcon to change.)
In order to nominate in the Hugo awards, two conditions apply: one must be (or have been) a Worldcon member before February for that Hugo year; and one must be able to buy or borrow enough newly-published SFF fiction to be able to nominate. This year, the first condition applies to me: the second doesn’t, though I do plan to try to read enough to be able to fill in a nomination form (given the wasps-nest I stirred up, that seems only fair). Voting for the Hugos on a regular basis is something you can only do if you live in North America and are at least well-off enough to buy new science-fiction and take your annual holiday every year at Worldcon time – or if you are much more well-off and can afford to take an annual holiday in North America most years (in which case, you can probably also afford to buy plenty of new SF…) It’s not a game for the poor, and women tend to be much less well-off than men, and much less likely to think they can spend what money they have on their own pleasures.
I got a lot of flack from various sources for proposing the Joanna Russ Amendment. I will admit here that while it would certainly have been fun if it had passed, the best I hoped for it ever was to get through to the Saturday business meeting and have discussion time there – I was not altogether surprised, however, when it got shot down without discussion at the end of Friday’s business meeting. What I wanted was to get people talking about all-male shortlists, about why every year for the past ten years at least there has never been a Hugo that was free of all-male shortlists: SF writers who write under women’s names are systematically ignored and devalued. It’s the James effect: it doesn’t take much.
When I thought about it, I realised that I should never have expected many woman writers who might someday get onto a Hugo shortlist to speak up in support of the principle. (And indeed, Cheryl Morgan, who won a Best Fan Writer Hugo in 2009, was the only one who did – though her strong support and help was worth a thousand: thanks again.)
For professional writers, winning a Hugo is to a certain extent an advantageous award. (Well, primarily, it keeps your book in print for longer, according to what I’ve been told.) To go out of your way to offend the small group of fans who nominate writers for this Hugo and that, by pointing out their sexist bias is responsible for all-male shortlists and means better writers are ignored and devalued because of their gender, would be professionally disadvantageous… to say the least. Add the James effect on – that these fans are not inclined to pick women writers – and the best response to the Joanna Russ Amendment for a professional woman writer would be outrage and open anger – how dare I suggest that the voting pool is biased, that the reason so few women writers are nominated is because the fans who do the nominating are subject to the James effect?
Well, I am not a professional writer. I write fanfic, and – as I noted on another panel at the Worldcon – one of the chief advantages of being a fanfic writer is that you have absolutely no standards to live up to: you can take whatever literary risks you want, because everyone with any literary standards whatsoever has already judged your writing as worthless. And I am not a Worldcon regular: I have nothing to lose by proposing the Joanna Russ Amendment – or by suggesting that if there’s another set of all-male shortlists, someone else should bring that pesky apple to the next WSFS business meeting and throw it at that wasp’s nest.
Because we need to break the institutionalised concept that so long as men succeed, the rules don’t need to change. And that’s a nasty, backhanded message.
Nomimations for this year’s Hugo Awards should open in early 2010. Are we going to see another year of “Just Call Me James” shortlists?
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- More blogging by
Yonmei at
http://yonmei.insanejournal.com
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Hugo Voting on the Cheap
Filed under Awards & Recognition, Cons & Community, FSF Activism, feminism, geek sexism, gender in marketing, women writers | Comments (23)
Voting for the Hugos on a regular basis is something you can only do if you live in North America and are at least well-off enough to buy new science-fiction and take your annual holiday every year at Worldcon time – or if you are much more well-off and can afford to take an annual holiday in North America most years
Actually no. Voting for the Hugos on a regular basis does not require you to attend Worldcon every year.
Now I grant that at around $50 a year supporting memberships are by no means cheap. However, we are doing more to make them value for money (thank you, Mr. Scalzi) and there is a possibility that next year we’ll be moving forward on decoupling the constitutional mess that keeps them so expensive.
Please don’t discourage people from voting by making it seem more expensive than it is.
Voting for the Hugos on a regular basis does not require you to attend Worldcon every year.
Well, if you are willing to pay $50 just to be able to vote in the Hugos – without actually getting to go to the Worldcon or be able change the rules that require you to pay $50 and receive a stack of ancillary bumpf in order to vote in the Hugos.
Please don’t discourage people from voting by making it seem more expensive than it is.
*raises eyebrow* I really don’t think I’m doing that.
*raises eyebrow* I really don’t think I’m doing that.
In which case you are a hopeless cause and you’ll get no more attention from me.
It’s already been pointed out you don’t have to attend the Worldcons to vote. Granted I’ve not felt I’ve had the money lying around to pay to vote. I certainly would do it if one of my friends was nominated.
As I understand it, Scalzi the last couple of years has worked to get electronic copies of all the nominated works given free to all voting members. So apart from the voting membership fee, there’s no other cost.
Now, of course, nominations is another matter. To read all the eligible works free is a lot trickier. But some are available online for free. Libraries are wonderful, especially when you factor in interlibrary loan. (Granted, more useful in some countries than in others.)
Time to read everything? I don’t think anyone has time to read everything. Read what interests you. If it’s a friend, a favorite writer, someone recommended to you. Maybe you read the reviews on IROSF and decide it’s worth tracking down the story to read yourself.
One hurdle to get over is the feeling that you can’t nominate or you can’t vote because you haven’t read everything. Even juried awards don’t always mean everyone on the jury has read everything. There’s usually a weeding process that goes on first.
So actually, going out of your way to read things you think the good old fanboys aren’t, would have a good deal of value. You’re not reading everything, but you’re helping to ensure everything gets read. That it gets a chance to be nominated. By you, if by no one else.
In which case you are a hopeless cause and you’ll get no more attention from me.
Can I just pretend you didn’t say that? Because what I meant to say – after having gone out for a walk and bought vitamin-laden juice and Christmas wrapping paper – was that rather than arguing about how expensive it is or is not to vote in the Hugos, which is not an argument I think is worth having (since you won’t convince anyone for whom $50 is too expensive, and I evidently won’t convince you that $50 is too expensive) that we do a joint post on “How to nominate for the Hugo Awards at the lowest possible cost” whenever nominations open?
I’d rather do that any day than in any way at all respond to your comment about treating me as a “hopeless cause”.
Yonmei:
I agree with you that it is too expensive. That’s why I want to get it down well below $50. All I’m saying is that there’s a big difference between $50 and the $1500 or so that it could cost someone in Europe or Australasia to attend.
But yes, let’s do a post. Nominations will open in January.
And please take note of J.Andrews excellent comment. One of the single biggest barriers to participation is the idea that you have to read “everything” before you can nominate. Women voters are, in my experience, particularly prone to that. It isn’t true. The voting system is designed on the assumption that people have not (and indeed cannot) read anything close to “everything”. Read interesting books and nominate them. That’s what the process needs.
One thing we can do for free is to recommend eligible books and stories to others. Promote the ones we really liked on our blogs, write reviews in various places. Like you might write a review on goodreads and then post that to facebook, as one example.
Even if you can’t afford to nominate, you can get the word out to those people who can.
And women writers need to not be shy about saying ‘Hey, I wrote this thing that was published this year. It’s eligible for a Hugo. Go nominate it please!’
Re cost of voting: Worldcons do try to give value to supporting memberships, Anticipation supporting members did get the souvenir book and other publications in the mail, and there’s the Hugo Voter’s Package, which I do hope becomes a permanent feature of Worldcons. Is it enough value for everyone to pay 50$? of course not, I have co-workers who spend that kind of money on stuff I wouldn’t spend a dime on (say a ticket for a sporting event). I do agree we should lower the cost, but things ned to be fixed for that to be available.
Re cheaper memberships: You say that the Business meeting voted against cheaper memberships for families and stuff, this is not exactly true, it voted against more restrictions on the costs of memberships (the kind of restriction that was meant to keep costs down but instead ended up raising the costs of supporting memberships, ie the kind of restriction we now need to get rid of). Anticipation didn’t need to consult the business meeting in any way to offer child memberships and family memberships.
And one last thing: a quick statistical survey of nominated works over the last three years (the only ones I had data for reveals a few things when is comes to gender balance:
1) The worst category is Best Artist (6% of nominees, none made the ballot). Why do you not mention that category, since it’s the one that needs the most improvement?
2) The best category ever is Best Editor Long Form (close to 50% of nominees). Why aren’t you celebrating that?
3) Overall there has been a marked improvement in the past three years (yes I realize to have a statistically significant trend, I need more than three year’s worth of data, but that’s what I have access to and so far, it looks good)
You say that the Business meeting voted against cheaper memberships for families and stuff
Not only voted against, but spoke against. I was right there when people were going up to the podium to argue that (for example) it would be unreasonable to permit families with children to buy reduced-rate memberships online, they ought to have to queue up to pay for them on the door.
1) The worst category is Best Artist (6% of nominees, none made the ballot). Why do you not mention that category, since it’s the one that needs the most improvement? / 2) The best category ever is Best Editor Long Form (close to 50% of nominees). Why aren’t you celebrating that?
Because I was looking at six specific Hugo categories only: Best Novel, Best Novella, Best Novelette, Best Short Story, Best Related Book, and Best Fan Writer. Besides the ones you mention (were you looking at the gender data for Best Professional Artist or Best Fan Artist?) I also didn’t look at the gender data for Best Graphic Story, Best Dramatic Presentations, Best Editor (Short Form), Best Semiprozine, or Best Fanzine. For a number of reasons, including that I wanted to stick to specific well-defined categories of long standing within the Hugo Awards. If you’d like to examine the data for the other categories for the past 10 years and post that as a comment to the Late Business At the Hugo Awards post, or elsewhere, I will link to that additional dataset from the front page very gladly.
They can speak against all they want, it did not prevent Anticipation from not increasing the cost of the children’s membership for almost two years (it went up 5$ for at the door) and offering a discounted family rate. Nor does it prevent other Worldcons from doing the same.
I am in favour of discounted family rates, but I would be opposed to it being hardwired in the constitution because I can see it having a harmful effect in the long run. Look at the supporting membership problem we currently have…
I meant Best Professional Artist, Best Fan Artist fares better and is about par for the course (I looked at ten categories: Novel, Novela, Novelette, Short Story, Related Book, Editor Short and Long, Artist Pro, Fan Writer, Fan Artist and the Campbell (not a Hugo)
I did not look at Fanzine and Semi-Prozine because I did not feel like doing the research needed to find out who edits all of them. I consider Dramatic presentation to be too much of a team effort (in general) to be relevant to this discussion and Graphic Story only has one data point so it’s hard to plot a trend…
Looking at the other post, you only look at who made the ballot, I was looking at that, but also at the list of nominated works for which I only have data for the last three years (see the links at the bottom of this post for what I’m talking about http://www.thehugoawards.org/2009/08/2009-hugo-award-winners/).
The big data point missing is what the gender breakdown is for all eligible works. If 30% of all eligible works are by women, then we should expect 30% of nominees to be women, likewise if 60% of eligible works are by women, then we should expect 60% of nominees to be women, we can’t _know_ if there is a bias until we look at that data.
I’ll gladly send you the spreadsheet I have, e-mail me privately for it.
Looking at the other post, you only look at who made the ballot
Yes. Have you just completely misunderstood what this discussion is about? Suggest you go back and re-read, though the summary version is:
Every year for at least the past ten years there has been at least one “written works” category in the Hugos which had an all-male short list. The Joanna Russ Amendment was in part an Apple of Discord to get people thinking about why there are all-male shortlists when so many excellent writers appear in the top 15 that a Joanna Russ Amendment would ensure that 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, would all have appeared on the Hugo ballot in the past ten years.
The big data point missing is what the gender breakdown is for all eligible works.
Absolutely. And the problem with trying to work that one out is (a) the number-crunching – listing every single eligible work by gender of author; (b) that the “Just call me James” bias does not begin on publication, it begins before publication. But the willingness of so many fans to assume that there can’t be a bias (and they’re not going to be the ones to look at the data to prove themselves incorrect) feeds into the “Fans are Slans!” mythology.
I’ll gladly send you the spreadsheet I have, e-mail me privately for it.
This spreadsheet goes back the past ten years?
No, I’ve not misunderstood what it is about, but I’m not just looking at who made the ballot but also who got a significant amount of nominations. (It’s been said elsewhere that if you were to take positions 6-10 and replace them with the nominees you’d still get a fine set of finalists). I’m just looking at a slightly larger data set for individual years, but as mentioned earlier am only looking back 3 years since I don’t have the data for previous years
Agree about the difficulty of getting data for all eligible works. As for the bias beginning before publication, I’ll point out that for Editor, Short Form, half the people getting nominated were women. These are women who select works that will get published — presumably there will be less of a bias there.
Social change usually takes about a generation to settle in, patience will be your best ally. I believe things _are_ improving.
Wow, yes, “patience” will solve things.
The comments from Hugo/WorldCon supporters have alternated between abusive, clueless, dismissive and condescending. That’s a really poor showing.
The frustrating thing is also that none of them is grappling with and acknowledging the deeper concerns of class bias, sexism, and racism that overshadow the Hugo nominations and WorldCon membership in general. Gah. Yonmei, you have my deep respect for dealing with the entire thing.
[...] Just call me James – Yonmei talks about how it really is easier for women who write under male pseudonyms than for those who don’t, on the Feminist SF blog. [...]
Rene: No, I’ve not misunderstood what it is about, but I’m not just looking at who made the ballot but also who got a significant amount of nominations.
So you’re wilfully ignoring what the discussion is about, rather than just misunderstanding? Good to know.
but as mentioned earlier am only looking back 3 years since I don’t have the data for previous years
It’s all available on the Hugo awards website, Rene.
Katie: The frustrating thing is also that none of them is grappling with and acknowledging the deeper concerns of class bias, sexism, and racism that overshadow the Hugo nominations and WorldCon membership in general.
Well, the issue of class bias is one that both Ide Cyan and myself have raised before to be generally ignored – no one wants to think about the issue that buying new science-fiction is not something that low-income fans can easily do, not even when it (fairly clearly) crosses into the “who can nominate for the Hugos” – you can’t nominate if by habit you read science-fiction books when they come out in paperback, stories when they appear in anthologies, or when they (finally) percolate through to library. It infuriates me when lack of money is treated as if it were lack of interest. I am and always have been passionately fond of and interested in science-fiction – which had no connection with whether I could afford to buy it new.
Sexism and racism is something that has been discussed in threads about Hugo nominations before, though: it’s just that it’s mostly non-regulars showing up in this thread.
The data I’m talking about is not available further back than the last three years on the Hugo Award website.
I’m talking about looking at the bigger Hugo Award picture (list of works getting nominations vs nominees vs winners, more categories than you etc…) and I’m ignoring the conversation? get real
Obviously you are not reading what I’m writing. I believe you’re the one who is willfully ignoring what others are contributing to this discussion. Have a nice life.
I’m talking about looking at the bigger Hugo Award picture
Whereas what I was talking about in the past three posts on the topic was looking at who gets on to the shortlists.
and I’m ignoring the conversation?
Yes, you are. See above.
Re Rene’s point that we have 50% female editors and therefore bias should not be a problem — if that’s the point being made there (feel free to correct me if that is not the point being made there) can I respectfully disagree?
The gender of the editor does not free that editor from bias. All editors, female and otherwise, have been reared in this same society. To throw off the blinders of patriarchy takes a willful effort. Men can do it; women can do it as well. But you have to actually do it. You don’t get born blinder-free just because you come in one specific gender.
By which I mean a female editor may just as well see a male name on the submission and favor that submission over a submission with a female name as easily as a male editor may. We get schooled just like men do.
Not to mention that even if 50% of editors are bias free, that doesn’t mean there’s not a problem. The 50% women editors have to be biased against male authors if the result is to achieve parity with the 50% of editors who are biased for male authors. And really, very few people want that situation either.
Wouldn’t it be a fine world if we could just read the story and not notice who had written the story? Or the application letter/resume and not notice the name & gender of the person who had written that letter and resume?
Well, maybe one day.
(Now cue people who will claim oh but they do just read the story and have never once noticed who is writing the story….who, oddly, will just happen to like white straight male European SF writers best of all, somehow.)
[...] Frau Sally Benz’s Pens Without Men, What’s in a pen name? at Feministing, Feminist Science Fiction also talks about the Hugo Award, Echidne’s Putting On The Mask, SunGold’s Bending [...]
[...] the past ten years this has been so. They just weren’t getting nominated. I wrote about this James effect (women writers tend to be devalued or ignored) which I believe to be one of the direct causes of [...]