April 7th, 2010
by
Yonmei
Women writers have tended not to be shortlisted for the Hugo Awards. Hugo Award short-lists (the top five works or authors nominated) have tended to be men-only or male-dominated. This tendency has been excused or this bias denied by assertions that there are not enough women writing SF: not enough women being published in SF: not enough good writers of SF are women: that women who write SF are shyer, less numerous, or less able, than men. Not, in other words, that the fans who nominate for the Hugo awards (the minority subgroup of the members of the previous Worldcon and the current Worldcon) could be biased.
But there are plenty of women writing and editing and drawing and working in SF today, and indeed in 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 this in a post at this blog in December last year: I was feeling tired and depressed and the post is fairly cynical.
I was identified at last year’s worldcon in Montreal as a member of “Fail Fandom” – that is, one of the fans who’d been part of Racefail 2009. (The fan who so tagged me had a habit of picking on the white fans who’d peripherally been part of Racefail and apparently simply not seeing the fans of colour who were more directly involved.)
With the helpful assistance of Kevin Standlee and Tim Illingworth and Cheryl Morgan, I put forward a late amendment to the Hugo Awards:
If in the written fiction categories, no selected nominee has a female author or co-author, the highest nominee with a female author or co-author shall also be listed, provided that the nominee would appear on the list required by Section 3.11.14 [which is the section that defines the "top fifteen" list, published within 90 days of a Worldcon's closing ceremony].
The details are in the post linked to, but presuming that the six categories affected by this amendment would be Best Novel, Best Novella, Best Novelette, Best Short Story, Best Related Book, and Best Fan Writer, I looked up the short-lists for the Hugo Awards as far back as 2000, and found that for the past decade, there wasn’t a single year in which the amendment would have lain unused: every year since 2000, there has been at least one short-list in each of these categories which was men-only, and most years, more than one. Another measurement I looked at: how often have the numbers of women and men been approximately equal in those categories? Eight times in total (out of a possible 60), and never in Best Short Story.
What changed this year?
Not one of those six categories is a men-only short list. (In fact, the only men-only short list in the Hugo Awards this year is that of Best Professional Artist.) Also, the numbers of women and men are approximately equal in three out of the six categories: Best Novelette (three women, three men) and for the first time in over a decade the Best Short Story category (two women, three men) and, in a complicated kind of way, the Best Related Book category (six entries, three with women authors, two major works of feminist science-fiction).
Kevin Standlee extended his sympathy afterwards because The meeting voted overwhelmingly to kill this motion without debate.
I did not seriously expect it to pass. I did hope for a reaction this year. (Cheryl Morgan’s excellent and much-cited post Hugo Voting on the Cheap was unquestionably a gate-opener: and the Works by women eligible for 2010 SF Awards resource at the FeministSF wiki was undoubtedly extremely useful to any of the voters who (like me) were going “There was that story I remember back then, what was the name again?”)
I have to say: this is an even bigger reaction than I’d hoped for. I hope this is just the beginning of change. Not just a single apple of discord thrown that hits the Hugos for a single year and then a return to “normal”: but
I want a women’s revolution like a lover.
I lust for it, I want so much this freedom,
this end to struggle and fear and lies we all exhale,
that I could die just with the passionate uttering of that desire… – Robin Morgan, 1971
In 2010, that a major SFnal award shortlists more women to be voted on this year than so many previous years, that there’s only one men-only short-list, that we can now point to 10 instances of balanced short-lists now out of 60, looking at the past 10 years, instead of 8 out of 60 as we could in 2009 – this shouldn’t look even remotely revolutionary. And yet (I admit) when I logged on late on the 4th of April, sitting in my sister’s living-room just having a quick check of email/blogs after celebrating her birthday, I looked at the just-available short-lists and I realised what had happened and only the thought of having to go into lengthy background explanations with my family of non-SF fans kept me from squeeing out loud. (It’s true. I’m sorry. I want to sound sober and sensible and reasonable about this. But you know how it is: sometimes, squee happens.)
One of the writers I nominated wasn’t short-listed, though she wrote what I thought to be one of the best single contributions to Racefail, which was (in my view, at least) the major fannish event of last year: I Didn’t Dream of Dragons, by Deepa D. Sadly, there’s a lot of competition about who could be said to be the worst contributor, but two of those definitely eligible are shortlisted for Hugos, though at least not for what they wrote for Racefail.
—-
Also, note that:
To vote on the final ballot, you must be a supporting or attending member of Aussiecon 4. You do not need to attend Worldcon in order to participate in the Hugo Awards. A “supporting membership” will be sufficient to make you a member of the World Science Fiction Society and get you voting rights for both the nomination stage and the final ballot. A supporting membership costs AU$70, US$50, or the equivalent in several other currencies. You can buy your membership here.
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- More blogging by
Yonmei at
http://yonmei.insanejournal.com
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Filed under Awards & Recognition, activism, fandom, women writers | Comments (6)
Yonmei,
you’re going to take credit for this? How, ummmm, EGOTISTICAL.
Almost disgusting and almost entirely unsurprising.
How about you wait a few years to see if this isn’t just some kind of statistical fluke and even then, just do your thing instead of trying to aggrandize.
[...] FailFandom to Hugo Awards – the Feminist SF blog reports on how the balance of the sexes evened out in this year’s Hugo Awards nominees lists, and on who can vote on them. [...]
[...] FailFandom to Hugo Awards: Pity? I don’t think so Yonmei reviews the improved presence of women in this year’s Hugo shortlists following discussion from last year. [...]
Did you notice that “I Didn’t Dream of Dragons,” by Deepa D. *was* shortlisted for the British Science Fiction Association award for best non-fiction? I attended the BSFA meeting that discussed the nominees the week before voting (it didn’t win) and am planning to write up the discussion along with some other observations on race and sf fandom from that trip in our TAFF trip report.
Did you notice that “I Didn’t Dream of Dragons,” by Deepa D. *was* shortlisted for the British Science Fiction Association award for best non-fiction?
Yes! I thought that was great, but I’m not eligible to vote (I rarely am).
and am planning to write up the discussion along with some other observations on race and sf fandom from that trip in our TAFF trip report.
Excellent. Do link back to it here.
Steve: you’re going to take credit for this? How, ummmm, EGOTISTICAL.
Your comment was left Pending for some time because, I presume, one of my fellow admins noticed it was basically a personal attack on me. I’m sorry you feel so offended.
Yes, I think I did make a difference. (Not I alone, as a cooler-headed person might have noticed I already acknowledged.) I can’t be sure: the change this year may have been an inevitable part of the trend that many feminist sf fans have been pushing.
But I note that you, among others, were ready to blame the Joanna Russ Amendment on me last year when all we’d seen it spark was talk. So yes: I think, though to your delicate manly sensibilities it may be outrageous to see a woman claim credit for what she did, I will ignore both your manly disgust and your manly outrage at my lack of proper female modesty.
Yes: I think the Joanna Russ Amendment from last year made a difference.
I wouldn’t have thought of proposing it if not for Cheryl Morgan: I wouldn’t have been able to propose it in proper form if not for the able help of several fans already credited: but my name went on it, for praise or blame, and as I took the flack, I should be able to take the credit, for all your feeling that I ought to shroud my pride and bow my head and behave more modestly in the presence of men.
Sadly, the only way I would know for sure how much effect the Joanna Russ Amendment and the following fireworks had – not least of them Cheryl Morgan’s “Hugo Voting on the Cheap” – is if next year, the short-lists are “back to normal” , ie stuffed full of men. And I really don’t want that to happen. I had rather never be sure how much effect had this one Apple of Discord that hit with such a resoundingly immodest clang, than see a dreary continuation of the all-male shortlists of before.